
Class __£^44:d_ 
Book • Qz;r2r 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




ih'Jtj^ 4. 



a/n^udinyy- 



GARRISON 



THE 

NON-RESISTANT 

By 
ERNEST CROSBY 

Author of 



PLAIN TALK IN PSALM AND PARABLE," "CAPTAIN 
JINKS, HERO," "SWORDS AND PLOUGHSHARES," 
"TOLSTOY AND HIS MESSAGE," "TOLSTOY 
AS A SCHOOLMASTER," "BROAD- 
CAST," ETC. 



1 



CHICAGO: 
THE PUBLIC PUBLISHING COMPANY 

FIRST NATIONAL BANK BUILDINO 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

DEC 9 1905 

Copyrieht Entry 

CLASS CK XXC. No. 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1905, 

by 

The Public Publishing Company 



o 



To 

William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. 

A Son 

Worthy of His Father 



Author's Note 



The facts relating to the life of Garrison 
and the anti-slavery struggle recited in 
this volume were gathered from the monu- 
mental work, ** William Lloyd Garrison, 
The Story of His Life Told by His Chil- 
dren " (Four Volumes, Octavo, Houghton, 
Mifflin and Company, Boston, Mass.), a 
fascinating book which should be found 
upon the shelves of every public library 
in America. 



CONTENTS 

Pare 
CHAPTER I 

The Liberator 7 

CHAPTER II 
The Boston Mob ^ - 18 

CHAPTER III 
Non-Resistance, Dissensions - - - - 30 

CHAPTER IV 
Constitution and Conscience 37 

CHAPTER V 
The Civil War 43 

CHAPTER VI 
The Labor Question 51 

CHAPTER VII 
Garrison the Prophet - 55 

CHAPTER VIII 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 62 

CHAPTER IX 
The Delimitation of Non-Resistance - - 74 

CHAPTER X 
Garrison and the Civil War 84 

CHAPTER XI 
The Results of the War in the South - - 106 

CHAPTER XII 
Practical Lessons from Garrison's Career - - 124 



FROM lips that Sinai's trumpet blew 
V/e heard a tender under-song ; 
Thy very wrath from pity grew, 

From love of man thy hate of wrong. 

— WHITTIER, "To Garrison. 



CHAPTER I 
THE LIBERATOR 

In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, 
Toiled o'er the types one poor, unlearned young man; 

The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean; 
Yet there the freedom of a race began. 

—LOWELL, "To Garrison." 

Oliver Johnson gives a graphic description 
of the room under the eaves of Merchants' 
Hall, Boston, in which Garrison printed the 
early numbers of his Liberator in January, 
1 83 1. "The dingy walls, the small windows 
bespattered with printer's ink, the press stand- 
ing in one corner, the composing stands 
opposite, the long editorial and mailing table 
covered with newspapers, the bed of the 
editor and publisher on the floor — all these," 
he tells us, "make a picture never to be for- 
gotten." "It was a pretty large room," says 
a later visitor, "but there was nothing to 
relieve its dreariness but two or three very 
common chairs and a pine desk in the far 
corner at which a pale, delicate and apparently 
overtasked gentleman was sitting. . . . 
He was a quiet, gentle and I might say hand- 
some man." The editor and his partner, 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

Isaac Knapp, lived for more than a year 
"chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes and 
a little fruit, obtained from a baker's shop 
opposite and a petty cake and fruit shop in 
the basement, and were sometimes on short 
commons at that." Here they worked four- 
teen hours a day at the manual labor of their 
enterprise. Garrison was at this time only 
six-and-twenty, and he had just been released 
from Baltimore jail, where his sympathy for 
the slave had placed him. He had no money, 
no subscribers, and scarcely a friend, but he 
procured some well-worn, second-hand type, 
and went forward against the Goliath of 
slavery with the calm assurance of a David 
"choosing him five smooth stones out of the 
brook." And indeed the language which he 
holds differs not essentially from that of the 
Hebrew shepherd. Thus spake David: "Thou 
comest to me with a sword and with a spear 
and with a shield, but I come to thee in the 
name of the Lord of Hosts; . . . this 
day will the Lord deliver thee into my hand." 
In the first number of his journal the penni- 
less and friendless Garrison delivered himself 
as follows: 

I determined at every hazard to lift up 
the standard of emancipation in the eyes 
of the nation within sight of Bunker Hill 
and in the birthplace of liberty. That 
standard is now unfurled, and long may it 

8 



The Liberator 

float, unhurt by the spoliation of time or 
the missiles of a desperate foe — yea, till 
every chain be broken and every bondman 
free! Let Southern oppressors tremble — 
let their secret abettors tremble — let their 
Northern apologists tremble — let all the 
enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble. 
. . . I will be as harsh as truth and as 
uncompromising as justice. On this sub- 
ject I do not wish to think or speak or 
write with moderation. ... I am in 
earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not 
excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — 
and I m)itt be heard. . . . Posterity will 
bear testimony that I was right. 

The picture of this shabby room with the 
pale young man at the case deserves to hang 
in the rotunda of the National Capitol, next to 
those of Columbus landing on the shores of 
the new world and Washington receiving the 
sword of Cornwallis. 

Who was this rash and intemperate fellow, 
who dared for many years to shock every 
respectable fiber in the character of New 
Englander and Northerner as well as of 
Southerner? William Lloyd Garrison was 
born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 
1805, the eldest of three children. When he 
was three years old, his father, who "followed 
the sea" and had taken to drink, deserted his 
wife and family and was never heard of more. 
They were left utterly destitute, and the 
mother, a noble woman, supported her babes 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

by going out as a monthly nurse. She also 
made candy, which Lloyd peddled about 
town. He was apprenticed to a boot-maker 
at an early age, and afterwards to a cabinet- 
maker, but he had neither the strength nor 
the mechanical skill necessary for these 
occupations. At last, when he was thirteen 
years old, he found his proper place in the 
printing office of the Newburyport "Herald." 
He soon became an expert at the types, a 
fellow printer testifying that he could work 
faster than anyone he had ever seen with 
one exception, and that he was far more 
accurate than this solitary rival. At sixteen 
he began to write for the paper, sending in 
his contributions anonymously by the post. 
His first article arrived in this way while he 
was engaged in setting up type, and his 
employer read it aloud approvingly in his 
presence, and turned it over to its author to 
set up, little guessing his identity. Long 
before his apprenticeship of seven years 
expired. Garrison was practically the sub- 
editor of the newspaper. At twenty-one he 
had a journal of his own, the Free Press, in 
his native town, and he distinguished his six 
months' interest in this sheet by discovering 
Whittier. The future poet was then a clumsy, 
half-taught farmer's lad of eighteen. He had 
already begun to write verses, and his sister, 
without his knowledge, sent some of them to 

10 



The Liberator 

the Free Press. Garrison at once recognized 
their merit and published them. He drove 
over to Haverhill to see the author and found 
him working in the fields barefoot. It was 
this encouragement that confirmed Whittier 
in his career and induced him to seek further 
education. As Garrison's venture at home 
was not sufficiently successful, he removed to 
Boston. Two years later he is editor of the 
first total abstinence paper ever published, 
the National Philanthropist, and in its col- 
umns he also declares his opposition to war. 
The year 1828 was the turning point of 
Garrison's life, and his conversion to the 
cause of the slave was the work of a Quaker 
who had already devoted thirteen years of 
his life to that object. Benjamin Lundy had 
given up a profitable business at a great 
sacrifice to edit an anti-slavery newspaper 
and urge the formation of anti-slavery 
societies. He was now the editor of the 
Genius of Universal Emancipation, which he 
conducted at Baltimore, and in which he 
advocated gradual Abolition and the coloni- 
zation of freedmen in Hayti. He traveled all 
over the country on foot in the prosecution 
of his designs, walking in this way thousands 
of miles. Visiting Boston in 1828, he hap- 
pened to board at the house in which Garri- 
son was living, and the latter was much 
impressed by the spirit of the missionary. 

II 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

Lundy tried to rouse the Boston clergy to an 
interest in his plans, and to induce them to 
form an anti-slavery society. He invited 
them to a private meeting, but only a few 
responded, and of these only eight would 
go so far as to recommend his paper. One 
or two expressed their readiness to take part 
in an active movement, but they were men of 
small weight in the community. All of those 
who attended the meeting were opposed to 
slavery, but with one consent most of them 
made excuse. "It would enrage the South to 
know that an anti-slavery society existed in 
Boston." "It would do harm to agitate the 
subject." The project of a society had to be 
abandoned. 

But if Lundy had failed with the clergy, 
he had inspired one more powerful than they 
were. Garrison was at the meeting, and was 
scandalized at the cowardice of these, the 
bravest representatives of the churches. A 
sudden enthusiasm for the cause of Negro 
freedom seized him. He began at once to 
attack slavery in his temperance paper, and 
announced as his triple aim the abolition of 
slavery, intemperance and war. Soon after this 
he went to Bennington, Vermont, to take 
charge of a newspaper which was sup- 
porting the re-election of President John 
Quincy Adams. In this journal Garrison con- 
tinued to denounce slavery, to insist on its 

12 



The Liberator 

abolition in the District of Columbia, and 
to suggest the formation of anti-slavery 
societies. The hunting of escaped slaves was 
common at this time in the North, and occa- 
sionally they preferred death to capture. Yet 
with such things taking place before their 
eyes, the population was blind to the iniquity 
of the system which rendered them possible. 
Garrison's management of the new paper was 
most successful. We have Horace Greeley's 
authority for the statement that it was "about 
the most interesting newspaper ever issued 
in Vermont." 

Lundy at Baltimore had watched the course 
of his disciple with pleasure, and in 1829 he 
came to Bennington, walking much of the 
way, to persuade him to join him in editing 
the Genius. Garrison did not hesitate for a 
moment to follow his friend's example and to 
give up a promising career for the certain 
want and hardship of a life consecrated to the 
liberation of the slave. He proceeded to 
Baltimore, and in September his name appears 
with Lundy's in the latter's paper. His 
experiences at Baltimore accentuated his 
hatred of slavery. He saw the auction of 
Negoes continually in progress, for many poor 
wretches were sold here and shipped to the 
New Orleans market. With his own ears he 
heard, while walking in the streets of the city, 
''the distinct application of a whip and the 

13 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

shrieks of anguish'* of the victim. One slave ex- 
hibited to him his back bleeding from thirty- 
seven terrible gashes inflicted by a cowhide 
thong. The courage of both editors in these 
surroundings knew no bounds, and in their 
columns they openly rebuked the worst 
offenders by name. On one occasion Garri- 
son heard of slaves being shipped in a vessel 
belonging to a prominent citizen of Newbury- 
port. He immediately began an attack upon 
him in the Genius, printing his name in capi- 
tals. He branded him and men like him as 
"the enemies of their own species — highway 
robbers and murderers." The result of this 
plain speaking was an indictment for mali- 
cious libel. Garrison was tried by a jury, 
found guilty, and sentenced to the payment 
of a fine of fifty dollars and costs, amounting 
in all to over one hundred dollars, a sum far 
greater than he could raise, if he felt disposed 
to. In consequence he passed seven weeks in 
jail, and while there he prepared a pamphlet 
giving an account of his trial, which attracted 
attention far and wide, and also devoted him- 
self to his fellow-prisoners, drawing petitions 
for pardon for several of them. He was 
finally released through the liberality of a 
New York merchant, Arthur Tappan, and he 
came out of prison undaunted and in buoyant 
spirits. Meanwhile the Genius had ceased to 
appear on account of lack of support, and the 

14 



The Liberator 

partnership with Lundy was of necessity dis- 
solved. 

As Garrison had no longer any reason for 
remaining in Baltimore, he returned to Bos- 
ton, and in August, 1830, he issued proposals 
there for a paper of his own. He also began 
to lecture on slavery. When he advertised 
for a free hall in Boston for an anti-slavery 
address not a church volunteered, although 
it was the custom of the time to hold all 
kinds of meetings in churches, but a favor- 
able response was received from an "infidel" 
society. It was actually a fact that at that 
period Garrison was almost the only man in 
New England whose eyes were entirely open 
to the sin of slavery. 

On January ist, 1831, the first number of 
the Liberator made its appearance. At the 
head of its columns was the motto, "Our 
country is the World. Our countrymen are 
Mankind ;" and it was further ornamented by 
a wood-cut representing a slave-auction block 
and whipping post with the dome of the 
Capitol at Washington in the background. 
This initial number struck one note which 
distinguished it at once from all other anti- 
slavery publications. It called for immediate 
and unconditional emancipation. Until recently 
Garrison had believed in the gradual freeing 
of the slaves, but on thinking the matter over 
he came to the conclusion that it was immoral 

IS 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

to favor the continuance for an hour of a 
system which is morally wrong. This novel 
"immediatism," as it was dubbed, coupled 
with the intentional harshness of the editor's 
vocabulary, which was in striking contrast 
with his manner in private life — these two 
peculiarities of the Liberator made it a 
mighty force almost from the beginning. The 
slave-holders themselves did much to make 
the paper widely known, proving once again 
that nothing helps a cause so much as a 
strong opposition. Taunted with being "man- 
stealers," they were soon goaded into a fury. 
The legislature of Georgia offered a reward 
of five thousand dollars for Garrison's capture. 
Throughout the South demands were made 
that the State of Massachusetts should put a 
stop to the incendiary publication and arrest 
the editor with or without the law. The 
public officials of the slave states inaugurated 
a system of examining the mails and throw- 
ing out all pamphlets and circulars reflecting 
on slavery, and this plan was followed for 
many years in flagrant violation of the postal 
laws. The high-handed conduct of the South 
produced a double effect in the North. A 
large portion of the community was in favor 
of humbly submitting to all the claims made 
upon them, either from sympathy with slav- 
ery or from a craven desire for peace; but 
there were many v/ho, while by no means 

i6 



The Liberator 

approving of Abolition, still cherished some 
prejudices in favor of the freedom of white 
men, and were forced by the overbearing 
insolence of the slave-holders in some degree 
to sustain Garrison in the right of free 
speech. The Abolitionists themselves, whose 
cause had dragged on without result for 
many years, in spite of the sincerity, ability 
and vigor of Lundy, for want of a definite 
programme, at once recognized the fact that 
their true leader had appeared; and most of 
them flocked to his banner, although Lundy 
himself, who died in 1839, never became an 
immediatist. 



CHAPTER II 
THE BOSTON MOB 

Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, 
and your fathers killed them.— St. Luke, xi:47. 

In 183 1 Garrison founded the New England 
Anti-Slavery Society at Boston, and began 
to lecture in its behalf. This was followed 
by the formation of a great number of such 
bodies, state and local, including the national 
society founded at Philadelphia in 1833. For 
some years associations were established at 
the rate of more than one a day, and a single 
society sometimes numbered its members by 
the thousand. Garrison's talents for public 
speaking stood him in good stead in promot- 
ing the formation of these bodies. He was 
not an orator, but the force, earnestness and 
logic of his addresses almost always carried 
his audiences with him. The first great con- 
test in which Garrison had to engage was 
between the "immediatists" and the American 
Colonization Society, an institution whose 
chief function v/as to put the conscience of 
the people at rest under the delusion that the 

18 



The Boston Mob 

Negroes could be deported to Hayti or 
Liberia, but which in reality was only effect- 
ive in removing freedmen whose efforts on 
behalf of their brethren in bonds were feared 
by the slave-holders, and the latter were by 
no means unfriendly to this movement. Gar- 
rison exposed the plan thoroughly in a 
pamphlet published in 1832, and a twelve- 
month later, on a special mission to England, 
he won over the principal Abolitionists there 
to immediatism as opposed to colonization, 
including the venerable Wilberforce. Six 
years afterwards, on another visit to Great 
Britain, he had the satisfaction of securing 
the adhesion of Clarkson, who hitherto had 
been induced by misrepresentation to support 
the colonizationists. In America it soon 
became clear, owing to Garrison's exposure 
of it, that colonization meant the indefinite 
continuance of slavery. Among the humors 
of his first stay in London was a dinner- 
party at which his host on receiving him and 
hearing his name lifted up his hands and 
exclaimed, "Why, my dear sir, I thought that 
you were a black man, and I have conse- 
quently invited this company of ladies and 
gentlemen to be present to welcome Mr. 
Garrison, the black advocate of emancipation 
from America!" He had in fact supposed 
that no white American could plead for the 
slave as he had done in the Liberator. This 

19 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

was a compliment to the editor indeed ! Gar- 
rison attended Wilberforce's funeral at West- 
minster Abbey, an humble follower in a dis- 
tinguished throng, but destined to do even 
more for the African race than the great 
Englishman. 

On landing at New York on his return 
from England in 1833, Garrison was present 
at a meeting called for the purpose of organ- 
izing a City Anti-Slavery Society. The 
enemies of the movement had issued circu- 
lars calling for a pro-slavery demonstration 
at the same time and place, with the object 
of breaking up the meeting, and a mob of 
drunken blackguards came together in conse- 
quence and succeeded in bringing the meeting 
to a violent close. The Courier and Enquirer 
had much to do with fomenting the riot on 
this occasion and the Commercial Advertiser 
and other "respectable" newspapers joined in 
denouncing Garrison. The Evening Post 
said : "We should be sorry that any invasion 
of his personal rights should occur to give 
him consequence and to increase the number 
of his associates." When Garrison reached 
Boston, he found that there, too, circulars 
had preceded him, calling upon the public to 
meet in front of his office on a given evening 
armed with plenty of tar and feathers, but 
although a dense mob breathing threatenings 

20 



The Boston Mob 

which foreboded a storm came together, they 
dispersed without doing any damage. 

The angry temper of the Northern public 
had also been shown elsewhere. In Connecti- 
cut, in 1833, Prudence Crandall, who had 
established a school for colored girls, was 
shut out of the churches, shops and public 
conveyances ; her well was filled with manure, 
and her house smeared with filth and at last 
set on fire. At Boston the directors of the 
Athenaeum library excluded Mrs. Child from 
using it because she was an Abolitionist. 
When anti-slavery sentiment made itself 
audible at Lane Theological Seminary, the 
trustees, with the assent of the president. Dr. 
Lyman Beecher, suppressed all debate on the 
subject. The Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon accused 
candidates for elective office who were willing 
to array themselves under the banner of the 
Abolitionists, with being "political desper- 
adoes;" and the American Bible Society actu- 
ally refused a gift of five thousand dollars 
which was to be devoted to the distribution 
of Bibles among the slaves! The great 
church assemblies showed their friendship for 
slavery in many ways, and a Presbyterian 
elder did not hesitate to say in the General 
Assembly of that denomination at Pittsburg, 
in 1835, that the church was the patron of 
slavery and responsible for its cruelties. 
Throughout the whole period of agitation 

21 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

against slavery not a Catholic priest nor an 
Episcopal clergyman came forward as a 
friend of the oppressed, with one possible 
exception. They were engaged in the time- 
honored pastime of passing by on the other 
side. 

Pro-slavery meetings were held in New 
York and other cities and pro-slavery riots 
broke out in many parts of the North. A 
great meeting was held at Faneuil Hall, Bos- 
ton, on August 2ist, 1835, to protest against 
Abolition. The principal men of the city took 
part and the mayor was in the chair. One of 
the orators turned to the portrait of Wash- 
ington and invoked his example on behalf of 
the slave-holders. The sum of three thousand 
dollars was offered in the South for the 
apprehension of Arthur Tappan, the New 
York philanthropist. At Concord (auspicious 
name!) V/hittier was pelted with stones and 
mud. A Harvard professor lost his chair on ac- 
count of his Abolition sentiments, and leading 
Northern publishers took pains to assure the 
South that they would print nothing hostile 
to slavery. This ignominious subservience to 
the slave power seemed to be almost universal. 

Amid such opposition and although "all 
pandemonium was let loose," Garrison became 
only more confident and determined. Four 
men, he tells us, are enough to revolutionize 
the world. Financial difficulties continually 

22 



The Boston Mob 

beset his path, but he always succeeded in 
surmounting them, and despite many a gale, 
the Liberator was able to proceed on its way. 
But the most conspicuous pro-slavery demon- 
stration was in the event directed against 
Garrison himself, and was the immediate 
result of the antagonism of the enemies of 
Abolition towards George Thompson, a dis- 
tinguished English Abolitionist, who was 
lecturing in America, and whose interference 
with our "domestic" institutions was most 
offensive to them. It was announced that he 
would address a meeting of ladies on the 
afternoon of October 21st, 1835, at a hall 
adjoining the offices of the Anti-Slavery 
Society and the Liberator, at 46 Washington 
street, Boston. Placards were posted in pub- 
lic places urging good citizens to bring the 
^'infamous foreign scoundrel to the tar-kettle 
before dark." In response to this several 
thousand angry men gathered in the street 
at the time set for the meeting, but Thomp- 
son had been wisely kept away. The women 
showed the greatest coolness and courage and 
went quietly on with their proceedings, 
although the door of the hall and the stair- 
ways of the building were thronged by a 
threatening and unruly mob. The mayor 
arrived upon the scene and endeavored to 
disperse the crowd outside by announcing 
that the Englishman was not in the city, but 

23 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

they soon showed that they did not care on 
whom they vented their wrath, provided only 
that it was on an Abolitionist. At last they 
broke in through the door of the Anti-Slavery 
Society office, where Garrison was calmly 
writing a letter. Some constables succeeded, 
however, in getting the rioters out of the 
house before further violence was done, and 
the mayor, going to the meeting-room, ordered 
the ladies to leave the building, as he would 
be unable to protect them longer. They 
adjourned accordingly to the house of one of 
their number, marching out two and two, 
each white woman taking a colored one with 
her. "When we emerged into the open day- 
light," says one of the number, "there went 
up a roar of rage and contempt. They slowly 
gave way as we came out. As far as we 
could look either way the crowd extended — 
evidently of the so-called 'wealthy and 
respectable,' 'the moral worth,' the 'influence 
and standing.' " 

"Garrison! Garrison!" was now the cry. 
"We must have Garrison! Out with him! 
Lynch him !" The mob demanded that the anti- 
slavery society signboard be removed. The 
mayor at once ordered it to be taken down, 
and it was speedily torn to pieces. The mayor 
now besought Garrison to escape by the rear 
of the building, and the latter, preceded by a 
friend, dropped from a back window on the 

24 



The Boston Mob 

roof of a shed and sought refuge in a carpen- 
ter shop on the street behind ; but his retreat 
was already cut off. The workmen in the 
shop did what they could for him, shutting 
the front door and keeping the crowd back 
until Garrison could hide himself upstairs, 
but in a few minutes the ruffians broke in 
and had no difficulty in finding his place of 
concealment. They seized him and dragged 
him to the window, intending to throw him 
out, but someone below in the street shouted, 
"Don't kill him outright," and, changing 
their minds, they tied a rope round him and 
let him down by a ladder. Fortunately he 
was received at the bottom by two strong 
men who were determined that the fame of 
Boston should not be stained by a lynching. 
They succeeded, with superhuman efforts, in 
guiding him through the crowd, in which it 
was evident now that Garrison had some 
sympathizers, to the door of the neighboring 
city hall, over the very ground where the 
first martyrs of the Revolution were slain in 
the Boston massacre of 1770, and where their 
degenerate descendants were now taking the 
part of the oppressors. The mayor had already 
reached the building. "On my way from the 
Liberator office to the city hall," he says, 
"several people said to me, *They are going 
to hang him! For God's sake, save him!'" 
Garrison was conducted with much difficulty 

25 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

to the mayor's office, and as he was now bare- 
headed and half naked, the friends of the 
mayor were obliged to lend him clothes to 
cover him. They decided that the only way 
to save him was to commit him to jail as a 
disturber of the peace! A carriage was sent 
to the door to deceive the mob, and while 
they waited, another carriage bore him from 
a door in the rear to the city jail. But the 
people, when they discovered the ruse, rushed 
upon the vehicle and tried to drag him out. 
They clung to the wheels, dashed open the 
doors, seized hold of the horses and tried to 
upset the carriage. But the police did their 
best, the driver plied his whip on the horses 
and on the rioters, and by some miracle Gar- 
rison was deposited at the jail in safety and 
locked up in a cell. On the morrow he left 
Boston and did not return until the fury of 
the storm had spent itself, but even then he 
was forced to change his residence, as his 
former landlord feared that his house might 
be destroyed. 

The biographers of Garrison call attention 
to the attitude of the authorities during this 
episode. "Law officers in abundance over- 
looked the scene of the mob; the legislators, 
in special session at the state house — John G. 
Whittier among them— hastened down to 
become spectators. Law was everywhere, but 
justice was fallen in the streets 

26 



The Boston Mob 

Wendell Phillips, commencing practice in his 
native city, and not versed, perhaps, in the 
riot statutes, wondered why his regiment was 
not called out." An alderman, when ques- 
tioned while the riot was in progress, "inti- 
mated that, though it was the duty of the 
mayor to put down the riot, the city govern- 
ment did not very much disapprove of the 
mob to put down such agitators as Garrison 
and those like him." The editor of the New 
England Galaxy overheard a justice of the 
peace remark: "I hope they will catch him 
(Garrison) and tar and feather him; and 
though I would not assist, I can tell them 
five dollars iare ready for the man that will 
do it." 

The press, secular and religious, unani- 
mously showed its opposition to the Aboli- 
tionists in this matter. The Daily Advertiser 
considered "the whole transaction as the 
triumph of the law over lawless violence," 
and the Christian Watchman (save the 
mark!), a Baptist journal, declared that the 
Abolitionists were as culpable as the mob. 

In the pages of the Liberator Garrison 
described the riot, and attacked its promoters 
and sympathizers with his customary force 
and ability. During the danger he had not 
for a moment lost his composure, as all who 
saw him bore witness, friend and foe alike. 
"Throughout the whole of the trying scene," 

27 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

he testifies himself, "I felt perfectly calm — 
nay, very happy. It seemed to me that it 
was indeed a blessed privilege thus to suffer 
in the cause of Christ. Death did not pre- 
sent one repulsive feature. The promises of 
God sustained my soul, so that it was not 
only divested of fear, but ready to sing for 
joy." This same courage enabled him to 
stigmatize the outrage in his paper according 
to its deserts, and never for an instant did 
he alter his tone from any sense of fear. 
Harriet Martineau, who was visiting America 
at this time, gives her impressions of Garri- 
son's appearance and manner. "It was a 
countenance glowing with health, and wholly 
expressive of purity, animation and gentle- 
ness." She found ''sagacity the most strik- 
ing attribute of his conversation," which was 
"of the most practical cast." 

The year 1837 showed a marked improve- 
ment in New England sentiment. While it 
is true that the Congregational Church pro- 
tested against the discussion of "certain top- 
ics" in meeting-houses, and that the Massa- 
chusetts Anti-Slavery Society could not find 
a suitable hall or church to meet in at Bos- 
ton and was obliged to organize over a stable, 
still the legislature went so far as to permit 
it to make use of the state house. This was 
a strong indication that the Abolitionists had 
become a power to reckon with. Twelve 

28 



The Boston Mob 

hundred anti-slavery societies were now in 
operation, and the foul murder of the Rev. 
E. P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, by a mob 
which thus exhibited its disapproval of his 
anti-slavery journal, did much to stir up Aboli- 
tion sentiment, already stimulated by many 
similar outrages in the South. Lovejoy's 
assassination brought Wendell Phillips into 
the ranks of the Garrisonians, and he declared 
himself in an eloquent speech at Faneuil Hall 
at a meeting called to express the indignation 
of all that was best in Boston. But still the 
low passions of the friends of slavery con- 
tinued to show themselves at the North. In 
1838, during a convention of Abolitionists, 
Pennsylvania Hall, a building recently erected 
in Philadelphia for these and other philan- 
thropic meetings, was burned to the ground 
by a pro-slavery mob; and it was only by 
calling out the militia that a similar crime 
was prevented in Boston, where another hall 
had been built for the same purposes. 



29 



CHAPTER III 
NON-RESISTANCE, DISSENSIONS 

Integer vitae scelerisque purus 
Non eget Mauris jaculis neque arcu 
Nee venenatis gravida sagittis, 
Fusee, pharetra. 

—HORACE, Odes, 1:2a. 

Any account of Garrison which failed to 
give due emphasis to his beHef in "non-re- 
sistance" would be most imperfect, for he 
regarded this principle as the very root of all 
his convictions. He seems very early to have 
had an instinctive repugnance to the use of 
physical force. In the declaration of senti- 
ment which he drew for the American Anti- 
Slavery Society in 1833, and which was 
adopted, he says: "Our principles forbid the 
doing of evil that good may come, and lead 
us to reject, and to entreat the oppressed to 
reject, the use of all carnal weapons for 
deliverance from bondage. ... Our 
measures shall be such only as the opposition 
of moral purity to moral corruption — the 
destruction of error by the potency of the 
truth — the overthrow of prejudice by the 

30 



Non-Resistance, Dissensions 

power of love — and the abolition of slavery 
by the spirit of repentance." In the midst 
of the Boston mob he exhorted his friends 
not to resort to violence, and he expressed 
his regret that Lovejoy fell fighting. The 
question of the moral character of war was 
much agitated about this time, and Garrison 
contended that if peace was invariably incum- 
bent on nations, it must be no less so between 
individuals. 

As was the custom of the day, a conven- 
tion was called to consider non-resistance as 
the true basis of peace. Some hundred and 
fifty delegates met in September, 1838, at 
Boston, and Garrison as usual dominated the 
deliberations, and drew up a declaration 
which was carried and afterwards signed by 
a large majority, and which he fondly hoped 
would "make a tremendous stir, not only in 
this country, but in time throughout the 
v/orld." "Mankind shall hail the 20th of 
September with more exultation and grati- 
tude than Americans now do the 4th of July." 
The document is a long one, but the salient 
paragraphs are as follows : 

We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any 
human government ; neither can we oppose 
any such government by a resort to phy- 
sical force. We recognize but one King 
and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of 
mankind. We are bound by the laws of a 

31 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

Kingdom which is not of this world, the 
subjects of which are forbidden to fight. 

As every human government is upheld by 
physical strength and its laws are enforced 
virtually at the point of the bayonet, we 
cannot hold any office which imposes upon 
its incumbent the obligation to compel men 
to do right on pain of imprisonment or 
death. We therefore voluntarily exclude 
ourselves from every legislative and judicial 
body, and repudiate all human politics, 
worldly honors and stations of authority. 
If we cannot occupy a seat in the legisla- 
ture or on the bench, neither can we elect 
others to act as our substitutes in any such 
capacity. 

It follows that we cannot sue any man at 
law to compel him by force to restore any- 
thing which he may have wrongfully taken 
from us or others ; but if he has seized our 
coat, we shall surrender up our cloak rather 
than to subject him to punishment. 

We believe that the penal code of the old 
covenant, *'An eye for an eye and a tooth 
for a tooth," has been abrogated by Jesus 
Christ, and that under the new covenant, 
the forgiveness instead of the punishment 
of enemies has been enjoined upon all his 
disciples in all cases whatsoever. 

The history of mankind is crowded with 
evidences proving that physical coercion is 
not adapted to moral regeneration ; that the 
sinful disposition of men can be subdued 
only by love ; that evil can be exterminated 
from the earth only by goodness. 

But while we shall adhere to the doctrine 

32 



Non-Resistance, Dissensions 

of non-resistance and passive submission to 
enemies, we purpose, in a moral and spirit- 
ual sense, to speak and act boldly in the 
cause of God; to assail iniquity in high 
places; to apply our principles to all ex- 
isting civil, political, legal and ecclesiastical 
institutions. 

The triumphant progress of the cause of 
temperance and abolition in our land . . . 
encourages us to combine our means and 
efforts for the promotion of a still greater 
cause. 

This "greater cause" (an admission indeed • 
for Garrison) held its own for some years. 
The convention founded a Non-resistance 
Society, and published a semi-monthly paper, * 
with Edmund Quincy as editor, who showed <. 
his sincerity by returning to the governor 
his commission of justice of the peace. His 
journal was issued for several years and paid 
expenses. But the demands of Abolition and 
non-resistance upon the same individuals 
proved too great, and graducdly and imper- 
ceptibly the movement subsided, destined 
doubtless at some future day to reassert its 
claim upon the conscience of mankind, al- 
though it may present itself in a different 
and more philosophical form. 

During these years signs of disaffection 
began to show themselves in the Abolitionist 
ranks. The scandalous inhumanity and ' 
cowardice of the churches had kindled against ♦ 

33 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

them the just indignation of Garrison and 
many of his followers. They retorted that he 
was an "infidel" and that his harsh language 
was unchristian. Five Abolitionist clergy- 
men led a revolt against him and insisted 
upon the formation of a new organization 
with a new journal of its own. It would be 
tedious to trace the history of these dissen- 
sions. They continued for many years, but 
Garrison stood to his guns without flinching, 
and in the end his course was fully justified. 
He also aroused opposition by refusing to 
countenance political action and by preach- 
ing non-resistance in the Liberator. His 
opponents urged that any Abolitionist who 
failed to vote was a traitor to the cause. 
Garrison, however, had conscientious scruples 
against voting, and in the whole course of 
his life only voted once for a political officer, 
and that was when he was a very young man. 
The seceders nominated candidates for presi- 
dent and vice-president in the national elec- 
tion of 1840, a course which only revealed 
their weakness, as party spirit ran so high 
that most of the anti-slavery voters followed 
their old party leaders to the polls. The 
"third party" Abolitionists, who supported 
their own candidates in 1840, eventually 
drifted into the Free Soil Party, and in 1852 
were contented with a declaration against 
the extension of slavery and the enforcement 

34 



Non-Resistance, Dissensions 

of the fugitive slave law — so far had political 
compromise allured them from the principle 
of immediate emancipation. It was fortunate 
that they never got the upper hand in the 
American Anti-Slavery Society. The ques- 
tion of woman's rights was also a burning 
one among the Abolitionists, and the cause 
of divisions. Should they or should they not 
take an equal part with men in conventions 
and committee work? Garrison stoutly up- 
held their right on all occasions; and when 
at the world's anti-slavery convention in 
London in 1840 they were excluded from the 
floor, he declined to present his credentials 
as a delegate and took his seat among the 
spectators in the gallery. 

Garrison's policy against slavery was * 
chiefly directed toward the creation of senti- 
ment, but he had several minor measures at * 
heart which he strove to forward with his 
customary persistence. He v/as active in 
petitioning Congress to abolish slavery in 
the District of Columbia. For years, as is 
well known, the Southern members tried to 
deny the right of petition in this regard, and 
John Quincy Adams bravely withstood them. 
The course of the South in opposing this 
clear Constitutional right disgusted all fair- 
minded people in the North and helped to 
spread and consolidate anti-slavery opinion. 
Another aim of Garrison's was to persuade 

35 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

England to buy her cotton from the free 
labor of India and thus strike a blow at the 
pockets of the slave-holders. Commercial 
reasons had much to do with Northern pro- 
slavery feeling, for the merchants of the free 
States did not wish to have their markets 
disturbed. General Dix, afterwards governor 
of New York, records that in 1850 he found 
merchants of high standing in the metropolis 
who declared their readiness to advocate the 
re-establishment of the foreign slave trade 
and the reintroduction of slavery at the 
North. 



36 



CHAPTER IV 
CONSTITUTION AND CONSCIENCE 

■Were you looking to be held togeth* r by lawyers? 
Or by an agreement on a paper? Or by arms? 
Nay, nor the world nor any living thing will so cohere. 
—WALT WHITMAN, "Drum-Taps." 

The Constitution of the United States rec- 
ognized the legality of slavery, and an idola- 
trous regard for that document and for the 
Union maintained by it between the States 
closed the eyes of many Americans to the 
iniquity of the institution. Webster was the 
high priest of this fetish-worship, and his mis- 
erable capitulation to the slave power was in 
part due to this false patriotism, and in part 
to his presidential aspirations. But he hu- 
miliated him.self in vain. Even Lincoln, who 
knew that " if slavery is not wrong, nothing 
is wrong," felt justified as late as August, 
1862, in saying, *'If I could save the Union 
without freeing any slaves I would do it; if 
I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I 
would do it; and if I could do it by freeing 
some and leaving others alone, I would also 
do that." Garrison never allowed the Con- 

37 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

stitutional argument to obscure the moral ob- 
ligation. He frankly acknowledged that he 
preferred the dissolution of the Union to the 
recognition, express or implied, of slavery in 
any form. It is rather difficult to understand 
at this distant day why the people of the 
North were so anxious for union with States 
whose inhabitants visited upon them indis- 
criminately the most opprobrious epithets, 
and I am inclined to believe that the South- 
erners must have had more respect for the 
outspoken anathemas of Garrison than for 
the truckling subserviency of time-serving 
politicians and tradesmen. The non-resist- 
ant was more of a man than his fellow citi- 
zens who saw nothing wrong in war. "No 
Union with Slave-Holders" became his 
motto, and in 1844 he began to print it weekly 
at the head of the columns of the Liberator. 
The Constitution was now for him a "cove- 
nant with death and hell." The annexation 
of Texas in the teeth of the most solemn ob- 
ligations, for the sole purpose of extending 
slavery over a territory in which it had been 
abolished, strengthened the feeling of hos- 
tility to the government among the Aboli- 
tionists, and the passage of the Fugitive 
Slave Law was almost more than they could 
bear. The South was steadily pursuing a 
policy which was bound to swell the Aboli- 
tion ranks and to rouse the enmity of many 

38 



Constitution and Conscience 

who had hitherto been friendly to them. In 
the light of history nothing could have been 
more futile than the course of their boasted 
statesmen. Even Boston could hardly stand 
the sight of a fugitive slave marching down 
to the wharf between files of soldiers to be 
returned to the questionable mercies of his 
master. Webster besought his State to 
"conquer her own prejudices," and declared 
that "anyone can perform an agreeable duty; 
it is not every man who can perform a disa- 
greeable duty," a remark which measures the 
depth of Northern hypocrisy, and shows that 
on the whole the North was more contemp- 
tible, if not more wicked, than the South 
throughout these wretched years. President 
Fillmore disgraced his State, New York, by 
signing the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850, al- 
though, if he had vetoed it, there was a 
chance of defeating it on its second passage. 
Six thousand Negroes at once fled from the 
miscalled free States across the border into 
Canada and found freedom on British soil. 
When Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker 
addressed a mass-meeting at Faneuil Hall 
to protest against the return of a captured 
slave, Judge B. R. Curtis, who hoped to ob- 
tain the post of chief justice from the slave 
power, and was in fact one of the greatest 
of living jurists, urged the grand jury to in- 
dict them as "obstructing the process of the 

39 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

United States;" and that honorable body 
complied with his request. President Pierce, 
a New Hampshire man, ordered out the 
troops to make sure the delivery of the un- 
fortunate captive. Congress, bent upon prov- 
ing that it was as much enslaved to the 
slave-holders as the Negroes themselves, in 
obedience to its task-masters, swept aside the 
Missouri Compromise, and passed the 
Nebraska Bill, which opened to slavery a 
vast region which had been solemnly dedi- 
cated by the same body to freedom. True in- 
deed were Whittier's lines: 

And Law, an unloosed maniac, strong, 
Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod, 
Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God 
The blasphemy of wrong. 

We may readily imagine the frame of 
mind in which these events left Garrison. 
At the 4th of July celebration of the Aboli- 
tionists at Framingham, Massachusetts, in 
1854, he made an address in the open air, 
in the course of which he produced a copy 
of the Fugitive Slave Law, and setting fire 
to it, burned it to ashes. "And let all people 
say. Amen," he cried ; and a shout of "Amen" 
went up from the vast crowd. Then he 
burned the decision of the commissioner 
ordering the surrender of a slave, and also 
the charge of Judge Curtis to the grand jury. 
"And let all the people say. Amen." Then 

40 



Constitution and Conscience 

he held up the Constitution of the United 
States, and declaring it to be the source 
and parent of the other atrocities, he com- 
mitted it too to the flames. "So perish all 
compromises with tyranny, and let all the 
people say, Amen." And the audience again 
responded from their hearts, "Amen!" In 
1857 he went so far as to take part in a State 
convention, called to urge the separation of 
the free from the slave States. 

It must not be supposed that throughout 
these years the Abolitionists were less per- 
secuted than formerly by their enemies. If 
public sentiment in some quarters was 
becoming more favorable to them, that very 
fact aroused the base passions of their oppo- 
nents. In 1850 James Gordon Bennett, in the 
Herald, deliberately stirred up a mob to put 
down the anniversary meeting of the Ameri- 
can Anti-Slavery Society at New York. He 
described the speakers as "William H. Fur- 
ness, of Philadelphia, v/hite-man, from 
Anglo-Saxon blood; Frederick Douglass, of 
Rochester, black-man, from African blood; 
William Lloyd Garrison, of Boston, mulatto- 
man, mixed race; Wendell Phillips, of Bos- 
ton, white-man, merely from blood." He 
added that "Garrison surpasses Robespierre 
and his associates," and borrowing his lan- 
guage apparently from a future generation, 
calls the members of the society "Abolition- 

41 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

ists, socialists, Sabbath-breakers and anar- 
chists." The Globe quite distinctly advised 
the murder of Douglass. The mob assem- 
bled promptly, and although on the first day 
the firm dignity of the speakers held them 
at bay, the further continuance of the con- 
vention was rendered impossible. "Thus 
closed anti-slavery free discussion in New 
York for 1850," said the Tribune. Similar 
events occurred in Boston, and the crowd 
silenced Phillips himself in Faneuil Hall. 
Even after Lincoln's election, anti-slavery 
meetings were broken up by rioters in Bos- 
ton, and on one occasion Phillips' life was 
for a time in danger. In Brooklyn Henry 
Ward Beecher had to be guarded by the 
police in Plymouth Church. 



42 



CHAPTER V 
THE CIVIL WAR 

War is a condition of hate subsisting between persons, and 
peace is a condition of good-will subsisting between persons. 

—ERASMUS, 

Garrison's doctrine of non-resistance was 
put to the test throughout this period and to 
the end of the Civil War itself, but he never 
wavered. In 1856, during the early struggle 
for freedom in Kansas, Theodore Parker and 
Henry W^ard Beecher had not hesitated to 
hold meetings in their churches with the 
object of raising money to buy rifles for the 
anti-slavery volunteers. Mr. Beecher said: 
"You might just as well read the Bible to 
buffaloes as to those fellows who follow 
Atchison and Stringfellow." Garrison ex- 
pressed his emphatic dissent from this asser- 
tion. To class human beings as wild beasts 
was, he said, merely to adopt the theory 
which the slaveholders applied to their 
slaves. The "border ruffians" of Kansas were 
less blameworthy than their respectable 
backers. "Convince us that it is right to 
shoot anybody, and our perplexity would be 

43 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

to know where to begin — whom first to des- 
patch as opportunity might offer. We should 
have to make clean work of the president 
and his cabinet" — and he goes on to enu- 
merate various distinguished men who must 
be considered as accomplices. 

We know not where to look for Chris- 
tianity if not to its Founder, and taking the 
record of his life and death, of his teaching 
and example, we can discover nothing 
which even remotely, under any conceiv- 
able circumstances, justifies the use of the 
sword or rifie on the part of his followers; 
on the contrary, we find nothing but self- 
sacrifice, willing martyrdom (if need be), 
peace and good-will, and the prohibition of 
all retaliatory feelings enjoined upon all 
those who would be his disciples. When he 
said, "Fear not those who kill the body," 
he broke every deadly weapon. When he 
said, "My kingdom is not of this world, 
else would my servants fight that I should 
not be delivered to the Jews," he plainly 
prohibited war in self-defense and substi- 
tuted martyrdom therefor. When he said, 
"Love your enemies," he did not mean 
"kill them when they go too far." When 
he said, while expiring on the cross, "Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what they 
do," he did not treat them as a "herd of 
buffaloes," but as poor, misguided and lost 
men. We believe in his philosophy; we 
accept his instruction; we are thrilled 
by his example ; we rejoice in his fidelity. 

44 



The Civil War 

Such was the argument of the man whom 
the churches, crying "Lord! Lord J" de- 
nounced as an infidel. It was in this very 
year that the Independent, one of the best 
known religious papers of the country, and 
on whose editorial board were such dis- 
tinguished clergymen as Dr. Leonard Bacon 
and Dr. Storrs, called Garrison an infidel "of 
the most degraded class!" 

When at last war became inevitable, Gar- 
rison deplored the martial spirit of many of 
the Abolitionists. "When the anti-slavery 
cause was launched," he said, "it was bap- 
tized in the spirit of peace." 

We proclaimed to the country and the 
world that the weapons of our warfare 
were not carnal, but spiritual, and we be- 
lieved them to be mighty through God to 
the pulling down even of the stronghold of 
slavery, and for several years great moral 
power accompanied our cause wherever 
presented. Alas! . . . We are growing 
more and more warlike, more and more 
disposed to repudiate the principles of peace. 
. . . Just in proportion as this spirit pre- 
vails, I feel that our moral power is 
departing and will depart. ... I be- 
lieve in the spirit of peace and in sole and 
absolute reliance on truth and the applica- 
tion of it to the hearts and consciences of 
the people. I do not believe that the wea- 
pons of liberty ever have been, or ever can 
be, the weapons of despotism. I know that 

45 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

those of despotism are the sword, the re- 
volver, the cannon, the bombshell, and 
therefore the weapons to which tyrants 
cling and upon which they depend are not 
the weapons for me, as a friend of liberty. 
. . . Much as I detest the oppression 
exercised by the Southern slaveholder, he is 
a man, sacred before me. He is a man, not 
to be harmed by my hand nor with my con- 
sent. He is a man who is grievously and 
wickedly trampling upon the rights of his 
fellow-man; but all I have to do with him 
is to rebuke his sin, to call him to repent- 
ance, to leave him without excuse for his 
tyranny. He is a sinner before God — a 
great sinner; yet, while I will not cease 
reprobating his horrible injustice, I will let 
him see that in my heart there is no desire 
to do him harm, — that I wish to bless him 
here, and bless him everlastingly, — ^and 
that I have no other weapon to wield 
against him but the simple truth of God, 
which is the great instrument for the over- 
throw of all iniquity and the salvation of 
the world. 

In speaking of John Brown after his raid 
at Harper's Ferry, he says: 

Judging him by the code of Bunker Hill, 
we think he is as deserving of high-wrought 
eulogy as any who ever wielded sword or 
battle-axe in the cause of liberty ; but we do 
not and we cannot approve any indulgence 
of the war spirit. John Brown has perhaps 
a right to a place by the side of Moses, 

46 



The Civil War 

Joshua, Gideon and David, but he is not 
on the same plane with Jesus, Paul, Peter 
and John. 

But these principles of Garrison did not 
prevent him, whenever war was actually- 
raging, from wishing success to those who 
fought on the side of liberty. 

As an ultra-peace man, I am prepared to 
say: Success to every slave insurrection in 
the South and in every slave country. 

I thank God when men who believe in 
the right and duty of wielding carnal wea- 
pons are so far advanced that they will take 
those weapons out of the scale of despotism 
and throw them into the scale of freedom. 
It is an indication of progress and a positive 
moral growth; it is one way to get up to 
the sublime platform of non-resistance ; and 
it is God's method of dealing retribution 
upon the head of the tyrant. Rather than 
see men wearing their chains in a cowardly 
and servile spirit, I would, as an advocate 
of peace, much rather see them breaking 
the head of the tyrant with their chains. 
Give me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill 
and Lexington and Concord, rather than 
the cowardice and servility of a Southern 
slave plantation. 

Garrison applied these rules to the Civil 
War, and gave his entire sympathy to the 
cause of the North, while disapproving alto- 
gether of the resort to arms. Although for some 
time after the election and inauguration of 

47 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

Lincoln the Abolitionists had reason to doubt 
his intentions with reference to slavery, and 
especially after he had summarily revoked the 
orders of General Fremont and General Hun- 
ter liberating the slaves in their respective 
military districts, still Garrison saw deeper 
than most of his fellow reformers, and almost 
from the first gave him his support. Lin- 
coln's oath of office, indeed, obliged him to 
accept the Constitution, and to that extent 
he was not a free man or a free moral agent. 
Occupying this false position, he felt bound 
in his inaugural address indirectly to stigma- 
tize John Brown's undertaking as the "great- 
est of crimes." He also insisted, in the same 
address, upon the rendition of fugitive slaves, 
and appealed to the oaths of members of 
Congress to sustain this obligation. Could 
any more striking example of the baneful 
effect of oaths be given than these passages 
which his oath extorted from the future 
Emancipator? He rose to a higher sense of 
his duties later when he told Congress in 
1864 that "If the people should by whatever 
mode or means make it an executive duty 
to re-enslave such persons, another, not I, 
must be their instrument to enforce it." Res- 
ignation of office is surely the only course 
for an official who finds himself called upon 
to do something which offends his conscience. 
Garrison earnestly urged the renomination 

48 



The Civil War 

of Lincoln against the bitter opposition of 
Wendell Phillips, who always strangely mis- 
understood the President. 

Now at last the virtues of the Abolitionists 
began to be generally recognized. In 1864 
George Thompson, who nearly thirty years 
before had barely escaped violence from pro- 
slavery mobs, returned to America. He was 
given a public reception in Boston, with 
Governor Andrews in the chair, and at Wash- 
ington a short time afterwards, he was invi- 
ted by the House of Representatives to 
deliver a lecture in their hall. Garrison, too, 
was treated with great respect when he visi- 
ted the national capital, and in the last month 
of the war, at the invitation of Secretary 
Stanton, he was present at the raising of the 
flag on Fort Sumter on the fourth anniver- 
sary of its capture. Dr. Cuyler, of Brooklyn, 
records that while he was standing with 
Garrison in the streets of Charleston, a band 
passed them playing "Jo^J^ Brown's Body." 
*'Only listen to that in Charleston streets!" 
exclaimed Garrison, and they both broke 
into tears. The Negroes received him in a 
large church building, several thousand of 
them being crowded into it. One of them 
addressed him in an eloquent oration on 
behalf of his race and two little slave girls 
presented him with flowers. This occurred 
on the very morrow of Lincoln's death, the 

49 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

news of which had not yet arrived. One of 
the party present at Fort Sumter and Charles- 
ton has informed the present writer that it 
was most impressive to see the reverence 
with which the Negroes looked at Garrison, 
many of them touching his coat as if they 
expected virtue to come out of it. 

When the adoption of the thirteenth amend- 
ment to the Constitution, declaring the aboli- 
tion of slavery, was assured, Garrison made 
up his mind to bring the Liberator to a close 
and to retire from the various anti-slavery 
societies. Their work was indeed ended, the 
mass of the population had caught up to 
them, and it was absurd now to pretend to 
any exclusive virtue. Many of the Aboli- 
tionists were incensed at his course, and 
insisted on keeping up the skeleton of their 
organization for several years; but the life 
had left them, and their total lack of influence 
proved how wise Garrison's action had been. 
He set up the last paragraph of his paper 
himself in December, 1865, and republished 
in the last issue the prophetic salutatory of 
thirty years before. Not one penny of gain 
had he to show for this lifetime of service. 



50 



CHAPTER VI 
THE LABOR QUESTION 

God speed the hour, the glorious hour, 

■When none on earth 
Shall exercise a lordly power 
Nor in a tyrant's presence cower. 
But all to Manhood's stature tower 
By equal birth ! 

-WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, 

'"The Triumph of Freedom." 

Garrison lived for thirteen years after the 
close of the war, and he continued to take 
an active interest in the freedmen, in woman's 
rights, in temperance, free trade and other 
reforms. He protested against the exclusion 
of the Chinese from America, believing that 
the yellow man is a brother as well as the 
black. "No suitable occasion for bearing 
peace and non-resistance testimonials was 
r^glected" by him, as his biographers tell 
us. He opposed the introduction of military 
drill into the public schools, and his conver- 
sation so impressed a young Japanese student 
who was preparing himself in America for 
the army of his country that on his return 
home he refused to serve for conscience* 
sake, and was duly cast into prison. 

It is not without regret that we must 

51 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

record Garrison's insensibility to the claims 
of the working classes outside the ranks of 
the slaves. Their condition was placed be- 
fore him by a correspondent in 1875, but it 
did not appeal to him. He seemed to think 
that the ballot (which, by the way, he con- 
sidered it wrong to make use of) was an 
all-sufficient remedy for their ills, and that 
the laboring man held his fate in his own 
hands. "You express the conviction," he 
adds, "that the present relation of capital to 
labor is 'hastening the nation to its ruin,' 
and that if some remedy is not applied it is 
difficult to see 'how a bloody struggle is to 
be prevented!' I entertain no such fears. 
Our danger lies in sensual indulgence, in a 
licentious perversion of liberty, in the preva- 
lence of intemperance, and in whatever tends 
to the demoralization of the people." In the 
same strain might a Southern planter have 
answered Lundy in the twenties! Garrison 
was only a fallible mortal after all, but surely 
he had already deserved well enough of his 
kind for us to overlook the natural conserva- 
tism of his old age. It is not everyone that 
can preserve to the end the freshness and 
alertness of vision of his youth, a quality 
which distinguished Wendell Phillips from 
his colleagues and outweighed the trivial 
defects of his character. 

The workingman, it should be said in this 

52 



The Labor Question 

connection, at one time at least had shown 
his devotion to the cause of the slave, and 
placed all Abolitionists under lasting obliga- 
tions. In 1863 a friend writing to Garrison 
from England says: 

The working classes also have proved to 
be sound to the core, wherever their opinion 
has been tested. Witness the noble demon- 
stration of Manchester operatives the other 
day, when three thousand of these noble 
sons of labor (many of whom were actual 
sufferers from the cotton famine) adopted 
by acclamation an address to President 
Lincoln sympathizing with his proclama- 
tion. A friend of mine who was present on 
the occasion tells me that the heartiness 
and enthusiasm of the workingmen was 
something glorious ; that he heard them say 
to one another that they would rather re- 
main unemployed for twenty years than 
get cotton from the South at the expense 
of the slave. Mr. Thompson has been in 
other parts of Lancashire, and the meetings 
he has addressed have been attended v^ith 
the same results. Our experience in Lon- 
don has been equally satisfactory. It would 
have done you good if you had ... at- 
tended the great meeting of the working 
classes which we held on the 31st of De- 
cember—the eve of freedom. 

Mr. Thompson himself corroborated this 
account in a letter written a month later: 

On New Year's Day I addressed a 
crowded assembly of unemployed operatives 

53 



Garrison the Non-Rcsistant 

in the town of Heywood, near Manchester, 
and spoke to them for two hours about the 
slaveholders' Rebellion. They were united 
and vociferous in the expression of their 
willingness to suffer all the hardships con- 
sequent upon a want of cotton, if thereby 
the liberty of the victims of Southern des- 
potism might be promoted. All honor to 
the half million of our working population 
in Lancashire, Cheshire and elsewhere, who 
are bearing with heroic fortitude the griev- 
ous privations which your war has entailed 
upon them ! The four millions of slaves in 
America have no sincerer friends than the 
lean, palefaced idle people, who are recon- 
ciled to their meager fare and desolate 
homes by the thought that their trials are 
working out the deliverance of the op- 
pressed children of your country. Their 
sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, 
their observance of law, their whole-souled 
love of the cause of human freedom, their 
quick and clear perception of the merits of 
the question between North and South, and 
their appreciation of the labor question in- 
volved in the "irrepressible conflict," are 
extorting the admiration of all classes of 
the community and are reading the nation 
a valuable lesson. 



54 



CHAPTER VII 
GARRISON THE PROPHET 

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, . . . for so persecuted 
they the prophets which were before you.— St. Matthew, v:i2. 

The career of Garrison is in many ways 
typical of that class of men who in the days 
of the ancient Hebrews were called prophets. 
Brought up in a strictly conventional and 
orthodox manner, he was in his youth a Puri- 
tan of the Puritans, a firm believer in the 
infallibility of the Bible and the divine char- 
acter of the church. Educated in a society 
which still remembered the days of the Revo- 
lution, he was taught to look upon that war 
as one ordained by heaven, and upon Ameri- 
can institutions as the embodiment of abso- 
lute justice. Gradually, however, doubts 
crept into his mind. He felt instinctively that 
physical combat was beneath the dignity of 
man. How then could wars be right? And 
how could governments which depend upon 
military power be righteous? Slavery was 
an evident fruit of coercion, the very 
reducUo ad Absurdum of it; and yet it was 
supported by the government, and by its 

55 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

fundamental law, the Constitution, and it 
was openly abetted and defended by the 
church. Was it possible to worship institu- 
tions which brought forth such harvests? By 
their fruits ye shall know them, and this fruit 
was rotten to the core. And he began to 
preach a crusade against coercion, and the 
government which enforced it, and the church 
which blessed it. Public opinion in Garri- 
son's time, and to a lesser degree to-day also, 
was singularly alike in religious and political 
matters. The pope, a man, had been deposed 
on the one hand, and the Bible, a writing, 
set up in his place. The king, a man, had been 
dismissed on the other, and the Constitution, 
a writing, enthroned in his place. The infal- 
libility of the pope had been transferred to 
the Bible, and the majesty of the king to the 
Constitution, and protestantism and democ- 
racy seemed destined to end in the worship 
of printer's ink. It was the old error which 
has always called forth the prophet to 
denounce it — the error of exalting the letter 
above the spirit. If protestantism and democ- 
racy have any meaning, they stand for free- 
dom; and yet Garrison found them approv- 
ing of military coercion, warfare and slavery. 
What was he to do? It was a hard wrench 
for him. It required many months for him 
to appreciate the true bearings of the situa- 
tion, but when he once saw clearly that his 

56 



Garrison the Prophet 

own standards of ethics were far higher than 
those of church and state, he took the part of 
the spirit against the letter, and of the living 
truth against the fossilized lie. And the 
result was that which no prophet has ever 
escaped. He was persecuted and hounded. 
He was called an infidel and blasphemer and 
Sabbath-breaker. He was accused of stirring 
up the people and stimulating insurrection 
among the slaves. But he stood firm, remem- 
bering the injunction to rejoice and be 
exceeding glad, for so had they persecuted 
the prophets which were before him. 

Garrison was a prophet, too, in the char- 
acter of his work. His denunciation of 
wrong was in the language of Isaiah 
and Amos; he had their fiery spirit and 
unmeasured tongue. It is easy to argue 
that this temper is unkind and unchristian, 
but I confess that I like it, when it has no 
personal intent. Take away the "woes" which 
Jesus pronounced against pharisaism and 
hypocrisy, and you leave his character 
enfeebled. Somehow a loving heart and 
strong language against evil can contrive to 
thrive together. And in private life Garrison 
was all kindliness, devoted to his wife and 
children and friends, and in turn almost 
adored by them. Nor, so far as I know, 
did he ever use harsh words towards any 
man to his face, and if he erred in this respect 

57 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

occasionally in his writing, it was because he 
took the individual as the incarnation of a 
wrong. His personal geniality and benig- 
nancy among his acquaintances were so great 
that it seemed impossible that he was the 
man who could, when occasion demanded, 
thunder against wickedness in high places. 
There was no limit to his courage when 
attacking the evils of slavery. While at 
Baltimore he showed again and again his 
willingness to run any risk in stigmatizing 
the conduct of those who were engaged in 
the slave trade, if necessary by name; and 
one ruffian who threatened him, he invited to 
come and meet him. 

He was free, too, from some of the common 
defects of reformers. There was nothing 
abnormal about him, except his philanthropy. 
As a boy he was active in sports, a good 
swimmer and skater. He sympathized heart- 
ily with the struggle of the Greeks for inde- 
pendence, and, having not yet formulated his 
belief in the immorality of war, he thought 
seriously of volunteering to fight in their 
behalf. His constitution was strong, and, so 
far from suffering from indigestion (which 
accounts for so much sour criticism of things 
as they are), he declared that he never knew 
that he had a stomach. And yet there was 
something of New England asceticism about 
him, for which I do not propose to apologize. 

58 



Garrison the Prophet 

The example of his father and of a brother 
who also died a drunkard naturally turned 
him against strong drink and the coercion of 
bad habits. He had little patience with smok- 
ing or loose or self-indulgent habits of any 
kind. One of his closest followers of a 
younger generation became in later years a 
disciple of Henry George and an advocate of 
equal rights in the raw material of the globe. 
Upon his first meeting with Mr. George, the 
great land reformer invited him into a beer- 
saloon to discuss the question with him, and 
the new recruit was shocked at the idea. 
Abolitionists of the true stripe looked upon 
the saloon as the gate of hell, and nothing 
else. But in movements of this kind, ascetic- 
ism, the control of the appetites, the ascend- 
ancy of the mind above things, has its place, 
and so, too, does the easy-going acceptance 
of democratic manners with their sociability 
and joviality. It is foolish to quarrel with 
these differences of temperament, for they 
diversify human nature and make the world 
a pleasanter place to live in. Certainly it 
would lack a good deal of backbone if the 
Puritan ideals were lost for good and all. 
Garrison was a Puritan to the end, and one 
of the best specimens of that strong type. 

And above all he was a prophet in his abso- 
lute merger of himself in his cause. Outside 
of it he had no personal ambition; and there 

59 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

is something which compels admiration in 
this attitude. Garrison belonged to a higher 
class of men than Lincoln, for he forgot him- 
self in his desire for the triumph of what he 
regarded as the right. Lincoln's great achieve- 
ments were incidents in a political career of 
the ordinary kind, the object of which was 
the promotion of his own interests and the 
assurance of his own advancement. As the 
world goes, we cannot criticize the ambitious 
lawyer, ready to argue any side of any case, 
nor the ambitious politician who wishes to 
be conspicuous; but such occupations and 
aspirations would be impossible to the noblest 
type of man. Garrison would at any moment 
have given his life and devoted his name to 
oblivion, if by so doing he could have helped 
his cause. And he Vv^as withal the most 
modest of men, even in conventions of his 
own people avoiding all appearance of dic- 
tation. 

And the last mark of prophethood was also 
Garrison's. Despised and rejected of men 
during the active part of his career, insulted, 
mobbed, almost massacred, yet, even sooner 
than is usually the case, the children of those 
who would have stoned him have raised 
monuments to his memory. The fine statue 
on Commonwealth avenue, Boston, in the 
very city which once nearly murdered him, 
bears on its pedestal the words taken from 

60 



Garrison the Prophet 

the first editorial in the Liberator, *'I am in 
earnest, . . . and I will be heard," and 
teaches a profound lesson to the young 
American as to the possibilities of the career 
of the prophet, even at this late day. What 
man walking the streets of Boston in the 
winter of 183 1 would have guessed that the 
most important bit of contemporary history 
was being transacted in an obscure garret? 
Their minds were occupied with the doings 
of Congress and the dispatches from London 
and Paris, but the real motive power of 
society rarely shows itself on the surface. 
What man who looked on at the Boston mob 
of 1835 would have supposed for a moment 
that the hatless, coatless, bewildered victim 
of the crowd would conquer in the end, and 
that the men who were threatening him would 
live to be ashamed of their cause? I think it 
was Whittier who advised young men to 
seek for some just and despised cause and 
attach themselves to it. Even from the stand- 
point of worldly wisdom, this is not such bad 
advice. The man who loses his life finds it. 
Garrison might have become a leading editor, 
or author, or poet, or statesman (for he 
possessed the gifts necessary for these call- 
ings), and he might have left a comfortable 
fortune to his children; but it is doubtful if 
in any other way than as a prophet he would 
have won a monument for himself. 

61 



CHAPTER VIII 
GARRISON THE NON-RESISTANT 

Oh, it is excellent 
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous 
To use it like a giant. 

— SHAKSPERE, "Measure for Measure." 

It is not without reason that I am treating 
Garrison as primarily a non-resistant, and 
only secondarily as an Abolitionist; for it 
was only by chance that his attention was 
turned to the abolition of slavery, while his 
instinctive dislike of coercion and love of free- 
dom were wider and earlier. They accounted 
for his condemnation of war, and they would 
have led him in his youth to take the side of 
liberty in any conflict which the condition of 
the times might have forced upon him. Gar- 
rison recognized fully the profounder claims 
of non-resistance and the fact that the aboli- 
tion of slavery was a mere episode in its 
history. The coercion of man by man was 
the root of slavery, and it is also the root of 
a thousand other ills. Between nations it 
means war and conquest and imperialism and 
international misunderstandings and hatreds 

62 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

and tariffs. Massachusetts and Boston have 
had the honor of leading in many campaigns 
for freedom. They were the first to resent 
the tyranny of George III. Under Garrison 
they were the headquarters of the anti-slavery 
movement. Recently we have found there the 
center of protest against the seizure and sub- 
jugation of the Philippines. But in every 
case it has been a select minority which has 
taken up the cause of liberty, and in every 
case this minority has been reviled and 
despised. Sam Adams was not respectable. 
Garrison was an "infidel" agitator. And 
to-day the anti-imperialists, the logical suc- 
cessors of Adams and Garrison in claiming 
freedom for all, are treated with scant cour- 
tesy. Let them possess their souls in 
patience. They will have their reward. 

But each of these movements was but an 
incident in the grand march toward freedom, 
and Garrison saw the wider aspects of his 
faith. He was one of the heralds of a new 
instinct — the instinct that man belongs to a 
higher plane than that of physical violence, 
and that he must rise above the methods of 
brute force in dealing with his fellows. The 
evolution of the race is a mysterious thing. 
Whence came the ideas of association, of love 
of neighbor, and of love of enemies? The 
new seed-thoughts take root at first in a 
single mind or in a very few select ones, and 

63 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

centuries pass before the stony hearts of men 
at large are fructified. These are real 
instincts, like that which sends the chick 
after its food before it is quite free of the 
egg. And the faint promise of that desire in 
the egg may have induced it to make an 
immense effort in the dark — to attempt the 
impossible — to break down its old environ- 
ment, apparently impervious and eternal, and 
seek a new world of infinite possibilities. 
There are two sides to evolution — that usu- 
ally dwelt upon, of conformity to environ- 
ment — and that far more significant one of 
dissatisfaction with environment, determina- 
tion to rise above it, and the actual effort 
against all nature to discover or create a new 
one. Life means not submission to, but mas- 
tery of, environment, and every seed is at 
heart a rebel. The parts of chaos were well 
suited to each other and to the whole. 
Whence came the whisper that there was 
something better, and the struggle of the 
universe to lift itself, as it were, by its own 
waist-band? It was an effort to do the 
impossible, and it succeeded. Discontent 
with environment is a motive power, and 
Garrison's instinctive aversion to coercion 
was a new creative principle which will yet 
have its preponderant part to play in the his- 
tory of man. Of course, I do not mean to 
say that he was the first man to feel the 

64 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

novel truth. It had been let loose many 
centuries earlier, and here and there there 
had always been witnesses to it; but in his 
own day and generation Garrison was a 
pioneer of non-resistance, and he was no 
imitator or repeater, but he felt its direct 
claims in his own consciousness. 

And men are governed and must be 
governed by their feelings. We are in the 
habit of talking of logic as if it were superior 
to sentiment; but all logic starts out from 
sentiment, and every syllogism can be traced 
back to a feeling — a taste — about which it is 
not to be disputed. Even mathematics, the 
most logical of sciences, rests upon axioms, 
and axioms are feelings. We say that a 
straight line is the shortest distance between 
two points, because we ''feel" that it is; and 
in the same way we believe that two parallel 
lines can never meet, and that one and one 
always make two. But these are all mere 
feelings, and the new mathematicians are 
actually arguing to-day that parallel lines can 
meet, and that our axiomatic feelings are 
erroneous. Men often think that they are 
guided by reason, while as a matter of fact 
they really feel their way ; and it is not a bad 
plan when logic leads you to some act which 
shocks your feelings, to use these latter as 
tests of logic. It is this humble, instinctive 
way of behaving which we call common- 

65 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

sense, and common-sense is the natural cor- 
rective of logic— just as when, sailing by 
right ascension and declination, we see the 
breakers ahead, we do not hesitate to fall 
back on the vulgar assistance of the lead. 
There is no such thing as pure logic. We 
are always guided either by feeling or by 
feeling-plus-logic; and hence logic, so far 
from adding certainty to our conclusions, 
rather, by bringing in a new element, adds a 
new possibility of error. The chief use of 
logic is not to show me what to do, but to 
afford me a rational excuse for doing what 
common-sense dictates. It is not the founda- 
tion on which I build my wall, but the prop 
with which I shore it up when it begins to 
look shaky. All the good and all the evil in 
the world have been caused by feelings, but 
probably feelings-plus-logic have done more 
harm in the long run than undiluted feelings. 
Logic is relentless. The logic of Torquemada 
was unanswerable. Heretics were damned. 
They made converts who were also damned. 
It was better to torture and kill a few of 
them than to consign a large portion of the 
race to hell forever. Q. E. D. The argument 
is unassailable, but if Torquemada had con- 
sulted his heart for a moment he would have 
thrown the whole flimsy sophism overboard. 
If I may indulge in a Hibernicism I would 
say that it is a good thing to keep your heart 

66 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

at your elbow. For the heart is the root of 
all, and feeling is the mother of logic, though 
logic often disowns its mother and endeavors 
to cut loose from her apron strings, ashamed 
apparently of its low birth. True logic 
should be proud of its maternal ancestor, and 
delight in calling in the good old lady when- 
ever it seems to be coming to grief. 

And clearly the idea that logic can inde- 
pendently lay down eternal truths is a fallacy, 
for the human race is living and growing. Our 
viewpoints vary and change from day to day. 
Our feelings are different from those of our 
fathers, and the logical structure which we 
rear upon them merely adds to the confusion. 
Garrison and Draco could not have argued 
intelligibly together because their root-feel- 
ings were different — they belonged to differ- 
ent epochs. Axioms alter from age to age, 
and the Quod erat demonstrandum of one 
period is the Redudio ad absurdum of the 
next. And the hard logic of an earlier age 
often survives into a new generation against 
whose deepest instincts it offends, and yet 
we persist in our allegiance to the old truth, 
become falsehood. There is therefore a grain 
of truth in the common saying that a rule of 
action is correct in theory but not in practice. 
Thus the axiom that it is best to hit a man 
who differs from you over the head has been 
fossilized and preserved by the logical insti- 

67 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

tutions founded upon it, into the midst of a 
period in which men feel instinctively that 
other less clumsy methods of treatment are 
better. We owe a lot of trouble to the 
Q. E. D.'s. And Garrison's mistake was not 
that he adopted a wrong principle, but that 
he was ahead of his times. He believed that 
the declaration of the non-resistant conven- 
tion would sweep over the country as the 
Declaration of Independence had done, only 
with a more profound and intense effect, as it 
was infinitely wider in scope. But two things 
are necessary to the success of a cause — not 
only a prophet, but also a people capable of 
understanding the prophet; and this audience 
was lacking to Garrison. He would have 
liked to be a leader to guide the world into 
the paths of peace. He had to content him- 
self in this regard with acting as a pioneer 
to stake out the land which some day man- 
kind will occupy. His immediate leadership 
was confined to a cause which in comparison 
was limited and local. 

But was this non-resistance principle of 
Garrison's a true one? And is there any 
prospect that it will triumph in the future? 
As an axiomatic statement its final sanction 
must be found in the individual conscious- 
ness. Answer for yourself. Is there nothing 
at the bottom of your heart which suggests 
to you at your best moments that the exer- 

68 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

cise of physical force against your fellows is 
unworthy of you? Has not the advance of 
civilization made men more and more skep- 
tical of the virtues of violence? Many men, 
at any rate^ while repudiating the claims of 
non-resistance, pay it the indirect compliment 
of worshiping or honoring supremely the 
men who have taught it. There can be no 
doubt about it — violence is played out. The 
use of physical force in the management of 
rational creatures is a survival of less enlight- 
ened times. The tendency is away from vio- 
lence of all kinds. Most of the evils of the 
world are caused by violence. Read the his- 
tory of mankind from the monuments of 
Assyria and Egypt down to the morning's 
news, and you will see that it is one long 
record of violence — man lifting up his hand 
against man and nation against nation. Mur- 
der, arson, robbery — robbery, arson, murder — 
it is the same old story over and over again. 
And to-day the dead and wounded lie all 
around us, not on the obvious battlefield 
only, but in city and town and hamlet. Visit 
the slums of New York or Chicago or Lon- 
don. See the poverty and crime and disease 
which come from overcrowding and enforced 
idleness and excessive labor side by side — 
the necessary consequences of monopolizing 
by force the natural opportunities of the 
earth ; men and women suffering from a rigid 

69 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

and artificial arrangement of things formed 
and perpetuated in the last resort by the 
mailed hand of society, held ever in readiness 
to crush the offender. The physical struggle 
has never ceased, disguise it as we may 
endeavor. Society has always been a Donny- 
brook Fair, and it is high time that we should 
be ashamed of our manners, for nothing could 
be more vulgar than this everlasting appeal 
to the cudgel. 

And the way to stop is to stop ! This seems 
such a simple remedy that men will have none 
of it. Yes, violence is an evil, they say; let 
us put it down by more violence. And we 
start out, each of us with his own ideas and 
his own weapons, and we proceed to break 
each other's heads again, and in so doing we 
are repeating the old useless conflicts of the 
Pharaohs. This noisy, bloody business is not 
the real history of the world. Its real history 
is the history of ideas. The real battle that 
counts is in the minds and hearts of men. 
Let us order our armies up to that plane. 
And at our best, I repeat it, we all feel a call 
to rise to that higher level. There is some- 
thing degrading in the use of force against 
others, and we are all conscious of it at the 
time. It is impossible to kick anything, I 
do not care what, and feel human. Catch 
yourself fhgranie delicto the next time and 

70 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

arraign yourself at your own bar, and I 
predict that you will find yourself guilty. It 
is a debasing proceeding. It is not our proper 
method, and if our environment seems 
to demand it, we must hope and pray 
and work for a new one; and the best 
way to create a new one is (so far as in us 
lies) to behave as if it had already arrived. 
Overcome evil with good. That is the truly 
human way. Let others get the better of us 
in this matter of violence. Forgive them. 
Let by-gones be by-gones. Stop this eternal 
bookkeeping of offenses between you and 
your neighbor, and do what you can to 
bequeath a clean slate to posterity. 

And the non-resistant is no weakling. Gar- 
rison himself is proof enough of that. The 
very renunciation of physical force seems to 
give a new and loftier power to a man. 
No, the strenuous man is not the soldier on 
horseback with saber drawn, but rather the 
man with folded arms who sees a new truth 
and utters it regardless of consequences. No 
one can injure the man who refuses to be 
hurt. You may kill him but you cannot touch 
the man in him. In another place I have 
given some examples' of the power and 
influence of such men even upon the savages 

i"Tolstoy and His Message," Funk & Wagnalla Company, 
New York. 

71 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

of America and Africa." The most influential 
men in history have eschewed physical force 
as an instrument. What man of all has 
exerted the deepest, widest influence upon 
mankind? Surely Jesus Christ from whom 
the very term "non-resistant" is derived. And 
after him? Siddartha, the Buddha, who abso- 
lutely condemned all violence. What man 
to-day in the Russian Empire, that home of 
brute force, has the greatest import for the 
world? Leo Tolstoy, without doubt, the man 
who would not lift his hand to compel. And 
Garrison, how do you explain the fact that he, 
with his hands tied behind his back, was the 
main motive power in that movement which 
has dwarfed all the rest of our history? 

Let us beware, however, of imitations and 
travesties of non-resistance. It is no colorless, 
negative quality, and should have no taint of 
timidity, no suspicion of effeminacy. Let us 
be quite sure that we are above violence, and 
not beneath it. It is far better to fight to the 
death than to decline the combat from 
cowardice, whatever may be the name behind 
which we mask it. A soft answer may, too, 
be turned into an offense, if the wrong 
emphasis is placed upon it. An apology 

' De Quincey in one of his articles on "Walking Stewart," 
the eccentric traveller, quotes the latter to the following effect: 
"It was generally supposed, he said, that the civilized traveller 
among savages might lay his account with meeting unprovoked 
violence, except in so far as he carried arms for his protection. 
Now he had found it by much the safer plan to carry no arms," 

72 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

should not come too easily. It ought to be a 
sort of self-punishment which will make me 
hesitate another time before incurring my 
own displeasure. I have a friend who apolo^ 
gizes at the least provocation — "Oh, yes, to be 
sure. You are quite right. I am awfully 
sorry;" and in five minutes he will be doing 
the same thing again, and rattling off the 
same formula. An over-issue of apologies is 
like an over-issue of paper dollars; it makes 
them altogether valueless. The superficial 
readiness to forgive comes under the same 
category. I once read a letter in which the 
writer apparently inflicted an injury upon the 
recipient. He closed it glibly as follows: "I 
know you will resent this, but I forgive you 
freely beforehand." Of course, this coin was 
counterfeit on its face. Forgiveness and 
apology, from sinned against and sinning, 
must represent positive sympathy with the 
other party, or they really become affronts. 
Forgiveness is a sort of self -blame, too; you 
blame yourself for not having forgiven 
before — for having to forgive at all — for taking 
any notice whatever of the offense, and it is 
the lack of universal sympathy which makes 
either necessary. You find yourself out of 
tune, like a violin, and you proceed to screw 
yourself up to the proper pitch. The chief 
use of forgiveness and apology is to the for- 
giver and apologizer. 

73 



CHAPTER IX 

THE DELIMITATION OF NON- 
RESISTANCE 

That society is the greatest where the highest truths be- 
come practical. 

— SWAMI VIVEKANANDA. 

Garrison expressed the obligation of non- 
resistance in its strongest form, and would 
admit of no exception or qualification. He 
declared that he would not defend his wife 
by force in case of an assault, and for such 
extreme expressions he has been freely criti- 
cized. For my part I do not object to over- 
statements (if this is one). They have their 
dramatic value, and carry their cause when 
a carefully trimmed shaft falls short. Just 
as an athlete makes his muscles rigid one 
at a time, first the right arm and then the 
left, now the waist muscles and then those 
of the legs — so mankind may well exercise 
its various powers to the utmost in turn. 
The all-round man is the ideal, but until we 
can produce him we must specialize more or 
less. I delight in the strong expression of 
an idea, from Francis of Assisi to Nietzsche, 

74 



Delimitation of Non-Resistance 

for I find the same muscle imperfectly devel- 
oped in myself. Each muscle needs the 
greatest development, and perfection will 
come with the equilibrium of the most vigor- 
ous opposites, and not with their atrophy. 
Pull your side of the boat and let me pull 
mine. Too much time is wasted in port's 
swearing at starboard and starboard at port. 
Your main duty is to be sincere and to be 
strong and to pull. 

But I believe that Garrison was right for 
other reasons than these. He was conscious 
of a new moral obligation to refrain from 
violence of all kinds, and it came to him as 
an abstract unqualified principle of universal 
application. It is of the very nature of moral 
principles that they transcend present environ- 
ments and point to the future. The fact that 
they are impracticable is the very source of 
their strength, for the attempt to apply them 
tends to transform the world. What dead 
things our principles would be if we could 
actually live up to them! They create and 
regenerate because they are impossible. It 
is impossible to be perfect in an imperfect 
environment, and yet it is our duty to be 
perfect; and this inherent contradiction in 
the moral world is the reason for the para- 
doxical character of all great teaching and the 
guaranty of perpetual improvement in the 
human race. Hence we cannot express our 

75 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

obligations in too strong and absolute terms, 
and the task of whittling them down to suit 
emergencies emasculates them and renders 
them useless. 

Take the obligation of telling the truth. 
Every man feels the beauty of this principle, 
and yet we know that there are occasions 
upon which we might utter falsehoods and 
justify ourselves in so doing. But is it not 
still true that the act of lying to an armed 
enemy, for instance, to save the life of a 
child would be an unpleasant act — that it 
would cause us a certain degree of offense — 
that we would wish to escape the apparent 
necessity? Is it not difficult to conceive of 
such a lie on the lips of a Jesus or a Buddha? 
and do we not instinctively take it for granted 
that they would find some other way out of 
the dilemma? And so with courage and 
cowardice. Where shall the line between 
them be drawn? At what degree of danger 
may the brave man be justified in flinching? 
Surely there is but one proper rule of action 
and that is, Never flinch. Nature will draw 
the line without our assistance. I am con- 
vinced that the attempts to delimit and 
define moral laws of this kind is demor- 
alizing. They will delimit themselves 
sufficiently in practice. We must accept 
them in their fullest sense, and then 
practice them as best we can, being assured 

76 



Delimitation of Non-Resistance 

that the mental perplexity which besets us is 
a part of the growing pains of the race. Not 
at all that such principles must be accepted 
as objective, dead, literal laws, but rather as 
living principles with all the transforming 
potencies of life. The injunction of the Dec- 
alogue against slaughter has never been 
improved upon. "Thou shalt not kill," said 
the law-giver, and unloosed a living moral 
principle — a seed with infinite possibilities of 
growth contained in it. It was not under- 
stood or applied. It never has been 
understood or applied. Perhaps it never can 
be, but therein lies the very secret of its 
power and immortality. Morality is not a 
matter of rules but of tendencies. Our own 
language shows it. (And what wonders of 
ancient and forgotten wisdom are buried in 
our language!) ''Right" and "wrong" 
(wrung) mean "straight" and "crooked." 
Ethics involve the direction which we take 
to a goal, and are of necessity relative to us 
and our present position. The goal should be 
forever beyond us. "Hitch your wagon to a 
star." "Thou shalt not kill." Turn your 
prow that way. Avoid killing. Kill just as 
little as possible. It should go against our 
grain to pull up a weed or cut down a tree. 
And some day when this sense of the sacred- 
ness of life has been fully cultivated by the 
very necessities of slaughter which surround 

77 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

us, we may find ourselves graduated into 
some sphere in which we may really live and 
let live, and find in turn some new, inac- 
cessible goal held up before us. 

But it is a mistake to assume to behave 
in accordance with a rigid formula express- 
ing a principle which is still too far beyond 
us. Garrison felt the full obligation of non- 
resistance. Whether he would have felt it 
in the case of an attack upon his wife or not, 
it is impossible to say; but we must not 
masquerade upon a plane to which we have 
not yet attained. I would not advise a man to 
act counter to his best instincts in such a 
case, but rather to endeavor to cultivate 
those instincts. We may be pretty sure that 
in such a case Jesus would not have killed 
the aggressor, but until we have his spirit 
we can hardly justify ourselves in adopting 
his method. The spirit of violence is an evil 
spirit, and it can only be effectually cast out 
by the spirit of love. If we have not that 
spirit of love which would render acts of 
violence impossible to us, it is futile to 
attempt to act as if we had, upon any pre- 
conceived intellectual theory of what we 
should or should not do. The doctrine of 
non-resistance is not a cold principle to be 
applied like the rule of three to a mathemati- 
cal problem, but a living power of the soul. 
Avoid violence. Indulge in it as little as 

78 



Delimitation of Non-Resistance 

possible. Do not worry yourself about any 
possible exceptions to the rule, but press on 
toward the goal. It seems to me that these 
are the best precepts. 

I can recall the case of a man who, follow- 
ing Garrison's example, refrained from voting 
upon the ground that government reposed 
upon force, and that force was the v/rong 
method. But after a few years he found that 
he was trying to live on a plane that was too 
high for him. Militarism and monopoly were 
ensconcing themselves ever more securely in 
the stronghold of office, and his conscience 
smote him that he did not cast his ballot 
against them. So he changed his course and 
began to vote against the wrong, as he con- 
ceived it, and for the better — there being no 
opportunity to vote for the best. And straight- 
way his conscience left him at peace. He 
was feeling his way, that was all. He did 
not deny the validity of the law of non- 
resistance; only he had not grown up to its 
full size. For him to masquerade in its livery, 
so far as voting was concerned, was a clear 
case of false pretenses. He was inconsistent, 
but, as we have seen, life is by its very nature 
inconsistent. The absolute logic of the law was 
qualified by his own personal contribution of 
common-sense. Logic and common-sense! 
Between them is stretched taut the throb- 
bing web and woof of life ! All controversy, 

79 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

conversation, manners and customs, laws, 
undertakings, progress, labor, craft, art, 
growth and life issue from their divergence. 
If ever they shall coincide, then at last will 
the words, 'It is finished," be written once 
for all on the tomb of the universe! Mean- 
while it is our business to strive to bring our 
common-sense up to the plane of logic, in 
the blessed certainty that we can never fully 
succeed. We preach logic and practice 
common-sense, longing for an environment 
where they may be lost in each other. We 
must pull our environments along with us — 
a long pull and a strong pull and a pull all to- 
gether; but to act upon the logical conse- 
quences of a rule which we have ceased to 
feel would leave us out of touch with our 
environment, disjointed and unrelated, with 
nothing but a lifeless, unassimilated law to 
comfort us, which is clearly absurd. In the 
last analysis the secret of sane living is to 
go on compromising, while shouting, *'No 
compromise!" The would-be abstainer from 
voting recognized the fact that a perfect man 
would not vote, but he felt like a hypocrite 
when he acted like a perfect man, knowing 
himself to be nothing of the sort. The role 
did not suit him. I ought of course to be 
perfect, but I must he perfect before I ad 
perfect, and it is downright dishonesty to 
imitate the empty acts of perfection. 

80 



Delimitation of Non-Resistance 

This matter of abstention — from voting or 
violence or anything else — suggests the two 
opposite ways of regarding any cause directed 
against any evil. I may have an over- 
whelming interest in the cause itself, so that 
I quite forget myself in it. My one effort is 
to put an end to the evil. Or I may simply 
try to wash my hands of it — to clear my 
skirts of it — and in my efforts to maintain my 
personal purity I may neglect altogether the 
question of the progress of the cause. Which 
is the better vegetarian — the one who starves 
himself to death by sticking to his diet under 
unfavorable circumstances, thus making him- 
self a living, or rather a dying argument 
against his principles ; or the one who is will- 
ing to eat meat for the sake of the cause? 
There is a good deal to be said for the latter 
individual. And so the non-resistant who 
votes in the direction of less force may argue 
that he is doing more for the cause than if 
he abstained. He would be right; and the 
man who had risen to a higher plane and 
abjured voting would also be right. At any 
rate it is difficult to see how Garrison's 
scruples about voting affected his influence. 
As a matter of fact, they kept him clear of 
the bootless embarrassments of third-party 
politics, and those who separated from him 
on this issue were soon lost in the crowd 

Pi 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

who were ready to accept any kind of a sub- 
stitute for immediate emancipation. 

There is a refreshing simplicity in hewing 
close to the line and in rejecting all tempta- 
tion to casuistry. We blame the Jesuit writers 
of "confessional" literature as if they were 
particularly immoral men; but it was not 
their fault. The task of trying to determine 
how near a man may come to doing evil 
without hurting himself is in itself depraving. 
Fire point-blank at the sun, and the force 
of gravity will describe a parabola for you 
without your assistance. Try to describe a 
parabola with your projectile and you will 
signally fail. We are all climbers on the 
slope of a conical peak, much too steep to 
mount directly — striving to reach the top. 
Our rule is, "Climb straight up"; and the 
man who comes the nearest to this impos- 
sible feat will get there first. It is a waste 
of time to speculate about angles and spirals. 
Our own inertia will take care of that of 
itself. And it is consoling to know that the 
world is going upward, ever more and more 
away from the plane of brute-force. In the 
education of children, the treatment of pris- 
oners, the conduct of wars, in every field of 
life, we are becoming more and more civil- 
ized and humane and human. Who shall fix 
a limit to this advance? Who shall say that 
barbarism ceases at this point, and here 

82 



Delimitation of Non-Resistance 

the race must cease to rise? I believe that 
this progress will be eternal, and that Garri- 
son in insisting that all use of force among 
men was wrong, was truly indicating the 
proper objective of human progress/ 

* A sign of the times is the recent book, "Resist not Evil," 
by the well-known lawyer and political leader of Chicago, 
Clarence S. Darrow, who advocates the doctrine in its extreme 
form with great ability. 



83 



CHAPTER X 
GARRISON AND THE CIVIL WAR^ 

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind 
rent the mountains and brake in pieces the rocks before the 
Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an 
earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after 
the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after 
the fire a still small voice.— I KINGS xix:ii, 12. 

Garrison is not known as a non-resistant 
because the world was not ready for non- 
resistance, but it was ready for Abolition, 
and consequently upon his labors for Aboli- 
tion his fame at present rests. But to the 
young agitator of the thirties one cause must 
have seemed as hopeless as the other — or 
rather they must both have seemed hopeless 
to those who lacked his faith. But he went 
on his way, full of hope, and sowed his seed 
faithfully, leaving the harvest to take care of 
itself. And he had the rare good fortune to 
reap one harvest, at any rate, during his life- 
time. He might, like so many other good men, 
have passed his life in urging the highest 
ethics upon a generation too blind to see the 

* A portion of this chapter appeared originally in the North 
American Review, and is reprinted here by consent. 

84 



Garrison and the Civil War 

truth; but fortunately he found a particular 
cause, completely in harmony with his high- 
est conceptions, and yet ripe for action. With- 
out abating a tittle of his beliefs, he threw 
himself heart and soul into the struggle for 
emancipation. 

In considering that struggle we are brought 
face to face at once with the anomaly that 
the cause fathered by a non-resistant was at 
last achieved by the greatest war of history. 
Does not this dispose of all the claims of the 
doctrine of abstention from violence? Was 
not non-resistance impotent until men who 
believed in bloodshed, gun-powder and cold 
iron came to its assistance? Is not physical 
force the true remedy for such evils as slavery 
after all? I think not. Garrison had just one 
thing to accomplish and that was to make 
slavery intolerable, and this he succeeded in 
doing. When it had once become intolerable, 
it was doomed; but the method of its aboli- 
tion was a matter of choice in which he was 
overruled. He has been blamed from the 
standpoint of non-resistance because he did 
not continue to protest against the war, and 
did not dissociate himself more distinctly 
from its methods. It has been urged 
against him that when a young friend who 
had obtained a commission in the army came 
to bid him farewell in uniform. Garrison 
slapped him on the back and wished him 

85 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

Godspeed without a word of disapproval. If 
there was any inconsistency in this behavior 
it was certainly very natural — very human — 
and he must be indeed a very rigid moralist 
who would refuse to excuse it. We all 
remember the story of the lady who, under 
most provoking circumstances, thanked a 
neighbor for swearing for her, and if Garri- 
son even went so far as to rejoice over the 
victories of an army committed to emancipa- 
tion, it was not a very heinous crime. But 
his general course during these difficult days 
seems to me absolutely consistent and praise- 
worthy. His defense, which we have already 
considered in another chapter, is impreg- 
nable. He was living among people who did 
not accept his standards of right and wrong. 
If they chose to fight over an issue which 
he thought should be settled peaceably, he 
could not but hope that the side of Abolition 
would triumph. 

Was war the best method of abolishing 
slavery? Was it a moral method? Was it 
the most efficient? As to its morality, the 
North is practically unanimous; but, then, so 
too is the South, and on the other side! 
This fact ought perhaps to disturb our con- 
fidence. Thousands of men and women who 
disapprove of most wars would make an 
exception of this, the holy war par excellence 
waged for the liberation of an enslaved 

86 



Garrison and the Civil War 

race. But has not the South an equal right 
to judge of holiness? It is and was much 
more religious and orthodox (as those words 
are ordinarily used) than the North. The 
leaders of the Northern hosts, Lincoln, 
Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and the rest, were 
not ''religious" men, and their connection 
with churches of any kind was usually of 
the most formal description; while Jefferson 
Davis, Lee and Stonewall Jackson were pil- 
lars of the church. And unprejudiced foreign 
observers often took the side of the South, 
too, of whom Mr. Gladstone was a notable 
example. Was his sympathy with the South 
a mistake? That depends, I think, on the 
character of the motives which determined 
his choice. If it was a kindly feeling for slavery 
that influenced him, of course it was a mistake. 
If it was a lurking fondness for the lazy, useless 
life of the Southern aristocracy — for the life 
of a class like his own, whose boast it was 
that it lived on the labor of others — then, too, 
it was a mistake. But it is possible to take 
another view of the issue. In the late fifties 
and early sixties, the North and South hated 
each other bitterly. I was brought up in the 
midst of that hatred and partook of it; and 
I remember suggesting, as a small boy, when 
Jefferson Davis was captured, that he be taken 
through the streets of our cities on exhibition 
in an iron cage. Our favorite song devoted him 

87 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

to death by hanging on a sour-apple tree. 
As for the Southerners, they could find no 
words vile enough to describe their fellow 
citizens of the North, "Northern scum" being 
one of the commonest and most polite. 

Here, then, is the ethical proposition: We 
have two neighbors living in partnership 
and hating each other with a deadly hatred, 
and one of them desires to separate peaceably 
from the other. There was no practical dif- 
ficulty in the way of making a division, for 
the cleavage ran along geographical lines, 
and any Master-in-Chancery would have 
been obliged to report that an actual parti- 
tion was perfectly feasible. Given this state 
of affairs, was it morally justifiable for the 
stronger partner to hold the other to his side 
by force? This is no Constitutional question, 
for it rises far above the plane of seals and 
parchment. Indeed, nothing obscures moral 
investigations so much as the dragging in by 
the heels of artificial and unnatural considera- 
tions. The simple issue was: Is it right to 
hold haters together by force? If Mr. Glad- 
stone decided this question in the negative, I, 
for one, do not see how he could reasonably 
have done otherwise. 

What was the psychological condition of 
the Northern mind, that the preference 
should be given to it? It was filled with 
hatred, as we have seen ; and, where it did 

88 



Garrison and the Civil War 

not hate, it was still bent upon having its 
own way. If we except an inconsiderable 
number of Abolitionists, the question of 
slavery did not affect the attitude of the 
North. It was only the South that was pre- 
occupied with slavery. President Lincoln 
said, as we have seen, that the war was under- 
taken for the sole purpose of preserving the 
Union, and that he would preserve it, either 
free or slave, or part free and part slave. He 
called out the troops to maintain the Union, 
and not to abolish slavery. The slaves were 
finally freed, as a war measure, to assist the 
armies in the field. The war was not de- 
signed to help emancipation, but emancipa- 
tion to help the war. And what was this 
"Union" for which so many lives were sac- 
rificed and in honor of which so much poetry 
was written? In the last analysis it was the 
forcible binding together of mutual haters, 
and its idealization was a curious example of 
fetish-worship. Apart from sentiment, the 
practical element in the Union spirit was the 
desire to preserve the size of the country; 
it was devotion to the idea of bigness, and 
the belief that bigness is a matter of latitude 
and longitude — the same spirit which pre- 
vailed in the Mexican and Philippine wars — 
in other words, the spirit of imperialism. It 
is impossible of course to extract any moral 
essence from a mere matter of geographical 

89 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

extension, and it is hardly necessary to point 
out that the highest civilizations of the past, 
those of Athens and Jerusalem and Florence, 
were restricted to narrow areas. 

If the morality of the Northern policy in 
the Civil War was questionable, its worldly 
wisdom was even more so. What would 
have been likely to happen if the South had 
been allowed to secede peacefully and with 
the good wishes of her late partner? That 
the Confederacy would have suffered from its 
new commercial isolation cannot be doubted; 
and that the States of the Confederation 
would have quarreled is almost equally cer- 
tain, for hard times make hard tempers. It 
is easy to predict, then, that a nation built 
upon the principle of free secession would 
not have remained long intact. It is very 
clear, too, that slavery could not have lasted 
long along the Northern border; for even 
before the war, with the fugitive-slave law in 
full operation, a continual stream of escaping 
slaves found its way across the intervening 
States to Canada. If nothing but an ordinary 
boundary line had separated the slave States 
from free soil, a general exodus of slaves 
would have begun, and ere long the border 
States would of necessity have ceased to be 
slave States. With slavery extinct, the reason 
for their separation from the North would 
have ceased, and their commercial interests 

90 



Garrison and the Civil War 

would have demanded reunion with the 
United States, while the kindly action of the 
North in permitting them to secede without 
interference would have left no hostile feel- 
ings in their minds to prevent such a reunion. 
With the border States once annexed, a new 
boundary would have been created along 
their Southern frontier, and here again his- 
tory would repeat itself, until the nation was 
again one. I do not think that such an out- 
come of Secession is fanciful, and its realiza- 
tion would have been hastened by the grow- 
ing impatience of the civilized world with 
the continuance of chattel-slavery. 

Against this natural evolution of the race- 
difficulty what have we actually to set? Slav- 
ery was, indeed, abolished ; but it is altogether 
impossible to sum up the evils which we have 
entailed upon ourselves by the manner of 
its abolition. First of all, we have the loss 
of hundreds of thousands of lives, and all 
the grief and suffering consequent upon that 
loss. It is a common remark that the wars 
of Napoleon permanently injured the phy- 
sique of the French people by killing off the 
strongest men. Is it not likely that we have 
suffered to some extent in the same way? 
Then, how much money did the war cost? 
And how much more wisely it might have 
been expended! Furthermore, consider our 
disgraceful annual pension bill, which, larger 

91 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

than the cost of any European standing army, 
is, I believe, actually increasing, and which 
seems to have transformed the brave hosts 
of the North into an army of mendicants! 
And into that mendicancy who shall say 
how much fraud has entered? Indeed, the 
moral effects of the war were its worst effects. 
Is there a tavern at any cross-roads, North or 
South, without its venerable toper whose 
habits were corrupted by the war? And 
where one has survived, how many have died 
of intemperance of all kinds, and of loath- 
some diseases which the war generated, fos- 
tered and spread down to this very day? All 
the flags with which we decorate their graves 
on Memorial Day cannot conceal the truth. 
I have seen it stated that discharged soldiers 
founded our army of tramps, a name which 
has come into use in my time. Do not think 
that these are the imaginations of a fanatic 
who sees in history only that which he looks 
for. In the Century Magazine for November, 
1903, is an article on "The Present Epidemic 
of Crime," by the Rev. Dr. James M. 
Buckley, one of the best-known clergymen 
in the country. At the very head of the 
causes of this "epidemic" he places the great 
war. "Among the influences which have 
powerfully affected the primary causes of 
crime, and are sources of this present epi- 
demic, is the effect of the Civil War. . . . 

92 



Garrison and the Civil War 

The evil done by that war to public and pri- 
vate morality was almost irremediable. Its 
effects were seen upon Congress, upon poli- 
tics, upon reconstruction, upon business, upon 
society, and upon the habits of the people." 

One of the worst results of the Civil War 
was the resuscitation of the spirit of war and 
imperialism. Is it a wonder that children 
brought up in an atmosphere of hate and 
bloodshed should have had the spirit of hate 
and bloodshed infused into their hearts? The 
seed sown then duly bore its crop, and the 
battle-cry, "Remember the Maine!" (a vessel 
which all the world but America believes to 
have been destroyed by accident) was the 
direct offspring of "The Union Forever !" The 
Cuban War, waged for the independence of 
Cuba (which could have been obtained, 
according to our Secretary of State and our 
Minister to Spain, without a shot), and the 
Philippine War, waged for the purpose of 
depriving a brave people of their freedom, 
are the legitimate twin offspring of the Civil 
War, which in their turn may have their 
accursed progeny a generation hence. 

The speculation caused by the interruption 
of commerce and the derangement of the 
currency during our war laid the foundations 
of the new plutocracy. Money was needed 
to pay the enormous expenses of destruction, 
and the tariff began to grow, and behind it 

93 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

monopoly ensconced itself. With the new 
tramp came the new multi-millionaire, and 
caste, luxury, pauperism and labor troubles 
in their train. It would be possible to write 
a long and plausible book, tracing the origin 
of almost all the pressing evils of the day 
to the Civil War. Was the forcing of the 
issue of the abolition of slavery a few years 
before its time worth while at such a cost? 
Garrison was right. The war was a mistake. 
This brings us to the sad fact that the war 
did not settle the race question, but merely 
aggravated it. Slavery was wrong and 
should have come to an end, but we ended it 
in the wrong way. The real trouble with the 
South at present is that the question of sla- 
very was settled over the heads of the in- 
habitants by a hostile and hated power. No 
people could at heart accept such a settle- 
ment with good grace, and it is not to be 
expected of human nature. We stabbed the 
South to the quick, and during all the years 
of reconstruction turned the dagger round 
in the festering wound. The spirit of war 
and imperialism has never yet properly set- 
tled any question, except the question as to 
which side is the stronger; land now, after 
forty years, we are beginning to learn that the 
Negro has yet to be emancipated. If the 
South had been permitted to secede, slavery 
would have died a natural death, the South- 

94 



Garrison and the Civil War 

erners would have felt that they had con- 
sented to its demise, and they would have 
accepted the new order with that attitude 
of acquiescence which is necessary to the 
success of any social experiment. We have 
still at this late day to learn the ancient lesson 
of Buddha: "Hatred does not cease by ha- 
tred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this 
is an old rule." 

The wisest thing that was said by any 
Northerner at the outbreak of the war was 
the saying usually ascribed to Horace Gree- 
ley : "Let the erring sisters go." Mr. Whitelaw 
Reid has loyally endeavored to defend his for- 
mer chief from this ascription, and he declares 
that Mr. Greeley never used the words. If 
Mr. Reid is speaking solely in the interests 
of historical accuracy, well and good; but if 
he is stretching a point to save his friend, 
he is doing him a doubtful service, for the final 
historian of the Civil War will have to record 
that these were the words, and the only 
words, of wisdom. And this was substan- 
tially the advice which Garrison gave. 

In an article in the North American Review 
I took the position that Mr. Gladstone was 
right in sympathizing with the South, and I 
was much gratified afterwards to receive a 
letter from an English ex-ofEicial who was 
close to Mr. Gladstone and familiar with his 
opinions, in which letter he assured me that 

95 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

my explanation of the British statesman*s 
position was correct. His communication 
ran in part as follows: 

But what was his real reason for sym- 
pathizing with the South? I am quite sure 
that it was not sympathy with the Southern 
"aristocracy" — which undoubtedly, however, 
had a great effect in bringing over the mass 
of upper-class opinion to that side. I do 
not believe it was his father's slave-owning 
connection (although that influenced some 
of his early speeches during the time he 
was still a Tory), for he had long since 
shaken himself free from those ideas. I 
firmly believe it was, as he viewed it, his 
love of liberty, his hatred and distrust of 
any policy of keeping any body of men in 
a political connection against their will. 
This he regarded as bad for the community 
which included an unwilling element in its 
midst, because it was an element of weak- 
ness and not of strength; just as a regi- 
ment wherein one-fifth of the men hate 
their officers or want to desert will not 
fight as well as a regiment "at union with 
itself." He further regarded it as bad for 
the element unwillingly included, because, 
being deprived of liberty, they were apt to 
direct all their energies to a struggle to be 
free, instead of along the natural lines of 
free and peaceful development and progress. 
This was at the root of his later Eastern 
policy, of his sympathy with Italy, and of 
his Irish policy, and also of his policy of 

96 



Garrison and the Civil War 

union with the Colonies by the silken ties 
of sentiment and the elastic bonds of free- 
dom, rather than by any forced and formal 
connection or by any cast-iron scheme of 
supposed material interests. 

Such were Mr. Gladstone's views, and such 
also were Garrison's. I do not believe that 
the final judgment of posterity will be favor- 
able to the course of the North in the Civil 
War, any more than it will be favorable to 
the policy of coercion in Ireland. It requires 
delicate instruments to cure national diseases, 
and we took the sledge-hammer as ours. It 
may be high treason to say so, but I think 
that the statesmanship of Gladstone — and of 
Garrison — was sounder than that of Lincoln. 

There is a class of critics which denies the 
importance of Garrison's services to the coun- 
try on the ground that all idealists and 
reformers are mere empty voices, and that 
none but economic causes affect the condition 
of men. The world, according to these phil- 
osophers, crawls upon its belly, and its brain 
and heart follow submissively wherever the 
belly leads. This is known as the ''economic 
interpretation of history," and is particularly 
affected by Marxian socialists, who believe 
that state socialism is destined to be estab- 
lished by irresistible economic laws, and that 
their own idealism and agitation are alto- 

97 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

gether fruitless; which does not prevent 
them, however, from laboring and sacrificing 
themselves for the cause, like the typical 
idealist. This belief and this behavior is 
strangely like the Christian doctrine of pre- 
destination, the certain triumph of the 
church, and the fore-ordained election of the 
saints, which has never interfered with the 
missionary activity of believers. The disciple 
of Marx comforts himself with the materialist 
equivalent of the statement that all things 
work together for good, and his dogmatism 
is as strict as that of any Presbyterian sect. 
It is the old issue of fatalism and free will, 
the fatalist usually exerting himself to secure 
his ends much more strenuously than his 
adversary. 

The most complete application of this the- 
ory of economic causes to the subject of 
slavery has been made by an acute socialist 
thinker, Mr. A. M. Simons, in a series of 
articles in the International Socialist Review 
of Chicago during the year 1903. According 
to him the idealism of Garrison and the 
Abolitionists — the growing belief in the 
immorality of slavery and the justice of the 
demand for freedom, John Brown and his 
raid. Uncle Tom's Cabin, the battle songs 
of the North— all these things were phantas- 



98 



Garrison and the Civil War 

magoria and the people were deceiving them- 
selves. 

The real conflict was . . . between 
the capital that hired free labor and the cap- 
ital that owned slave labor." 

And Mr. Simons represents the Northern 
capitalists in the anticipation of a future 
struggle between themselves and their 
employes, as deliberately determining that the 
capitalists of the South should not enjoy the 
"privilege of an undisturbed industry." It 
seems to me that anyone who can believe 
this can believe anything that he wishes to. 
The fact is that slave labor did not compete 
with the free labor of the North. The South 
had a practical monopoly of the production 
of cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar, and slavery 
was chiefly confined to that production. The 
relative cheapness or dearness of slave labor 
had consequently no appreciable effect on 
Northern labor; and if it had, it is absurd to 
suppose that Northern capital appreciated 
the fact or brought about the war for any 
such reason. It is true that the North 
desired a protective tariff for its manufactures, 
and that the South preferred free trade so 
that it might have a world-v/ide market for 
its cotton. It is true that North and South 
each desired to control the national govern- 

^ Quoted by Mr. Simons from a former work by Benjamin E. 
Grten. 

99 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

ment. But no war would have been fought 
if the South had not seceded; the South 
would not have seceded unless she had 
feared for the future of slavery; and slavery 
would not have been menaced except for the 
agitation of the anti-slavery people of the 
North with Garrison at their head. 

As a matter of fact, human idealism enters 
into all the works of man; and the philoso- 
phy which asserts that poetry and religion 
spring from economic conditions and nothing 
else, is erroneous or at least one-sided. That 
mind and body are so intermingled that they 
react upon each other is undoubtedly true, 
and our extreme idealists need to be reminded 
now and then that the bread and butter factor 
must not be forgotten ; but to assert that mind 
is made of bread and butter is going much too 
far, and it ignores the commonest experiences 
of human consciousness. Man's wish — man's 
will — is a force to be dealt with. Even ordi- 
nary hunger involves wish and will in the 
choice of food. Is our present civilization 
governed partially by the yield of wheat? 
But wheat itself is a human creation. The 
first man who tasted a grain of wild wheat 
and liked it and proceeded to sow other simi- 
lar grains was moved as much by fancy as 
by economic necessity. And there is hunger 
and hunger. There is a hunger and thirst 
for knowledge, and a hunger and thirst after 

100 



Garrison and the Civil War 

righteousness, and many other hungers and 
thirsts which must all be reckoned with in 
the study of evolution. And man can see 
the workings of this side of evolution in his 
own mind. I have become a vegetarian, for 
instance, and I am unable to detect any eco- 
nomic reason for my change of diet. I know 
many others of whom the same is true. In 
time the increase in the number of such vege- 
tarians will produce an appreciable effect upon 
the economic condition of mankind, and here 
clearly will be a change occasioned in large 
part by pure idealism. The same is true of 
socialism, and I know many leading socialists 
who, so far from having been impelled to 
socialism by economic motives, would be eco- 
nomic losers by its victory. And so with the 
temperance movement, the peace movement, 
the movement for the prevention of cruelty to 
animals, and many others. I am conscious 
and every man is conscious, of doing things 
every day against mere economic interests, 
and I do not refer exclusively to philanthropy 
by any means. The millionaire who spends 
his money on a trip to Europe instead of 
saving it overrules his economic interests on 
account of his higher desire for novel expe- 
riences, and he does the same thing when 
he pays for a superfluous ornament on his 
house. To overlook men's desires is to over- 
look life itself, and in the record of the living 

lOI 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

actions of men the thought precedes the 
thing. You cannot have a dinner without 
thinking it out beforehand, nor build a house 
without plans. You might wait till dooms- 
day for "economic conditions" to roast a 
potato for you. The will of man must inter- 
vene before the miracle is performed, and 
sometimes he wills to rise above his economic 
conditions and refuses to bend before them. 
In short, the "economic interpretation of his- 
tory" is equivalent to the brick interpretation 
of a house (leaving the architect and the 
owner who ordered it built out of the ques- 
tion) — that is, no interpretation at all. 
Economic conditions are more often the limi- 
tation than the source of evolution. The exer- 
tion of our powers is more or less bounded 
by our materials, and events which are not 
economically possible are not likely to hap- 
pen ; but things are not yet in the saddle and 
the socialist movement, with its devoted and 
self-forgetful leaders, gives ample proof of it. 
It is curious to note that our extreme mate- 
rialists call themselves "scientific socialists," 
and our extreme idealists, who deny the exist- 
ence of matter, take the name of "Christian 
scientists." True "science" lies between these 
extremes, and perhaps it is wise to fight shy 
of those who advertise their "science" too 
conspicuously. 

In the history of slavery the element of 

102 



Garrison and the Civil War 

human will and initiative is particularly 
prominent. A sentimental bishop was the 
first to suggest the importation of Africans 
to America in order to relieve the Indians 
from the labor which their spirit could not 
brook. It was a philanthropic business at the 
start. Indians would not work, Negroes 
would. Here again the human factor asserted 
itself. The cavalier immigrants of the South 
did not Hke to work, the Puritans of the 
North did ; hence one of the reasons that slav- 
ery flourished only below Mason and Dixon's 
line. Mr. Simons refers to this fact as "one 
of those strange happenings" called "coinci- 
dences"! "The interesting point lies," he 
goes on to say, "in the fact that in Europe it 
was just the cavalier who represented the old 
feudal organization of society with its servile 
system of labor, while the Puritan is the 
representative of the rapidly rising bourgeoisie 
which was to rest upon the status of wage- 
slavery." "Strange happening," "coincidence," 
"interesting point"! This is certainly most 
naive. There was no reason why slaves should 
not be employed in the North in raising wheat 
as well as in the South in raising cotton, except 
that the Northerners did not want them, and 
heredity as well as climate goes to account 
for the difference. Mr. Simons himself quotes 
from the work of an ante-bellum author a 
reference to German settlers who, "true to 

103 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

their national instincts, will not employ the 
labor of a slave." And in fine, as if to show 
how little he is convinced by his own argu- 
ments, Mr. Simons says of this same volume 
(Helper's "Impending Crisis"), "This book 
had a most remarkable circulation in the 
years immediately preceding the war, and 
probably if the truth as to the real factors 
which made public opinion could be deter- 
mined, it had far more to do v^^ith bringing 
on the Civil War than did 'Uncle Tom's 
Cabin' " — which involves an admission as to 
the latter book as well as to the former. 
Books and arguments and ideals had their 
leading part to play in the abolition of slav- 
ery, and the very adversaries of the belief 
cannot get away from it. "Public opinion" is 
and always has been a determining element 
in history, and it is swayed by novels and 
agitators and poets. Garrison still has his 
place in history. 

Another class of critic minimizes the work 
of the Abolitionists upon the ground that they 
did more harm than good, and that slavery 
would have been abolished much more easily 
without them. To refute this argument we 
must appeal to the entire history of the times, 
which has been so briefly summarized in 
these pages. We cannot read it impartially 
without being conscious throughout of the 
constant presence, behind statesmen and poli- 

104 



Garrison and the Civil War 

tician, behind orator and editor, of the goad 
of the Abolitionist. In the troubled waters of 
controversy his was ever the stirring power. 
He was not a fly on the wheel, but steam in 
the engine. And we can call the best of all 
witnesses in confirmation of this fact. Presi- 
dent Lincoln, a few days before his assassina- 
tion, when congratulated by Mr. Chamberlain, 
afterwards governor of South Carolina, upon 
having freed the slaves, answered, "I have 
been only an instrument. The logic and 
moral power of Garrison and the anti-slavery 
people of the country, and the army, have 
done all." 



105 



CHAPTER XI 

THE RESULTS OF THE WAR IN THE 
SOUTH 

For what can war but endless war still breed ? 

—MILTON. 

We have considered some of the general 
effects of the Civil War upon the country — 
effects which would have been avoided if 
Garrison's peaceful counsels had prevailed; 
but many of these evils have been especially 
concentrated in the South. This is not the 
fault of the Southerner, for with the possible 
exception of his lesser fondness for manual 
labor, he differs in no essential respect from 
other men of Anglo-Saxon descent, and so 
far as the race question is concerned, the 
Northerner who settles in the South is usu- 
ally the less considerate of the two. But the 
war absorbed the entire South. Every man 
and boy took part in it. It devastated the 
home, and where it did not devastate it 
impoverished. War mjas hell in Georgia, 
where General Sherman learned its character 
after having created it ; and not a mere matter 
of the morning newspaper, as it was in many 

io6 



Results of the War in the South 

a Northern household. It was a matter of 
necessity that its damning effects should be 
greatest in the States of the Confederacy. If 
it is true that a large crop of military schools 
sprang up in the North, and that much was 
done to infect the minds of the young with 
the ideals of militarism, in the South every 
lad inherited by his birthright the title of 
major or captain. I have my own impres- 
sions of a recent journey in the South which 
revealed to me the unfortunate results of 
choosing war as an antidote for slavery, and 
perhaps I may be pardoned for devoting a 
chapter to my recollections, believing that 
they substantiate Garrison's position that 
gunpowder should have no place in the social 
pharmacopeia. And first, then, to show that 
the race question is farther from settlement 
than ever. 

I put up one afternoon for a few hours at 
a tiny hotel in a remote village, and a room 
was assigned to me which had been vacated 
in haste for my benefit by some more perma- 
nent resident. It bore all the marks of a 
sitting-room as well as a bedroom, and on 
the table were lying, one on the other, a 
couple of books which had evidently been 
recently laid aside, and each of them con- 
tained a book-mark. The under volume was 
a large Bagster Bible; the upper was a big 
book bearing on its upturned cover the exag- 

107 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

gerated face of a negro in gilt, made to look 
as much like an ape as possible, with the 
title in gilt letters above and below it, "The 
Negro a Beast, Or In the Image of God." 
Two Negro servants were coming in and out 
of the room, making the fire and preparing 
for my comfort, and I could not but wonder 
at the strange lack of delicacy of the Bible 
reader who had left this hideous volume to 
stare them in the face, and this, too, in the 
chivalrous South! I picked up the book in 
curiosity after the servants had left. The 
title page was adorned by a series of sub- 
titles, of which I copied one as a sample. It 
read as follows: "The Negro a Beast, But 
Created With Articulate Speech and Hands, 
That He May Be of Service to His Master, 
the White Man." Here was indeed a rich 
relic of the ancient South of slavery, a South 
that has passed away forever! I looked 
down at the date and rubbed my eyes in 
astonishment. There must be some mistake. 
The book was printed in the year of Our 
Lord 1900! And in one of the greatest cities 
of the South, too ! And what do you suppose 
is the name of the publishing company which 
issues this precious work? It is called the 
"American Book and Bible House !" I turned 
over the pages of the book. It was an 
illiterate medley of folly and superstition — an 
attempt to prove by Scripture that the Negro 

108 



Results of the War in the South 

was not the descendant of Ham, and to show 
that the serpent in the garden of Eden was 
a black man ! It was just such a book as, if 
it had been produced by a Negro, would 
almost have justified despair for his race. It 
is not remarkable perhaps that a single 
lunatic should have written such a book, but 
that a publisher should have been found for 
it, that commercial success should have been 
expected from it, that people should buy it 
and lay it on their Bibles and leave it on 
their tables to insult the black men who saw 
it, and astound the white — all this was in- 
credible. 

It so happened that I was reading a book 
written by a Negro at the same time, and I 
took it from my portmanteau and laid it 
beside the other volume. My book was 
Booker Washington's "Up from Slavery," a 
book which I had some difficulty in getting 
in a great Southern city, and which proved 
conclusively that its author was one of the 
best and ablest men in this country, black or 
white; and it made me blush for my white 
race as I thought of these two authors 
together. 

And shortly afterwards I read a third book, 
which occupies the middle ground between 
these two, but which unfortunately resembles 
the white man's folly more than the black 
man's wisdom. It is "The Leopard's Spots," 

109 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

by the Rev. Thomas Dixon, a shining light 
in the Southern Baptist Church ; and it tempts 
me to retort, ''Thou tiger, first wash the 
stripes out of thine own hide, and then shalt 
thou see clearly to wash out the spots out of 
thy brother's hide," for it is in the spirit of 
the tiger rather than in that of the 
Christian minister that Mr. Dixon treats the 
delicate issues of the race question which is 
the subject of his novel. The point which he 
seeks to make is that the Negro must be 
kept by force, if necessary, in the place of an 
inferior, and that he should not be educated 
above it. Again and again he reiterates the 
statement which I give in his own words, 
for it seems to me to be lacking in clearness 
to say the least, that "in a democracy you can- 
not build a nation inside of a nation of two 
antagonistic races, and therefore the future 
American must be either an Anglo-Saxon or 
a mulatto." This mixing up of the marriage 
relation with other social relations runs 
through the whole book, and it seems to me 
to be illogical. I have dined on a social equal- 
ity with thousands of white women whom it 
would have been repugnant to me to marry. 
I fail to see that the one idea involves the 
other. I believe it is natural and best that peo- 
ple should intermarry within their own race. 
We received Li Hung Chang with complete 
social equality, and yet most of us would not 

no 



Results of the War in the South 

be willing to marry his daughter, and proba- 
bly he fully reciprocated the feeling. In the 
absence of all inherited artificial feeling and 
tradition, I should think that a Negro would 
prefer to marry one of his own color. The 
wrens and orioles are now singing out of my 
window. They do not intermarry, but I do 
not see why that should prevent them from 
treating each other with entire courtesy up 
to the point of social equality. The danger 
of a nation of mulattos, if it is a danger, does 
not lie in the direction of intermarriage, as 
we all know, but of the illicit intercourse 
which has already produced millions of them, 
and which shows how far the white man can 
overcome his distaste for the Negro. Flout 
the fact as we may, a large part of the col- 
ored population of the South are our own 
cousins. 

The matter of the *'usual crime" committed 
by Negroes is a frightful one and it will have 
to be faced, but it is very clear that it has 
not been faced in the right way. Lynchings, 
burnings at the stake — and Mr. Dixon depicts 
one for us — have failed to decrease the num- 
ber of them. And let us remember that 
every civilized nation contains solitary brutes 
who assault and murder women, but that 
only white Americans still burn at the stake 
— and that, too, in multitudes. Savagery will 
not cure savagery, and the tiger cannot tame 

III 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

the leopard. Mr. Dixon seems to see this 
when he speaks of the mob as a thousand- 
legged beast, and anticipates with dread the 
time when there will be a black beast of the 
same kind to set off against the white beast. He 
thinks that the permanent display of force 
by the whites is the best remedy, and forgets, 
Christian minister though he be, that the effi- 
cacy of sympathy and brotherly interest has 
scarcely been tried. The race question is no 
simple matter to be settled at a thousand 
miles' distance by academic theories; but it 
is safe to say that it will only be solved by 
the spirit of love, and that Booker Washing- 
ton shows far more of this than the author 
of "The Leopard's Spots." Mr. Dixon may 
not know it, but he seems to believe in a 
gospel of hate. One of the heroes of the 
book, an ex-Confederate common soldier, 
admits that he hates the very sight of a 
Negro, and this before the period of recon- 
struction had set in and when the Negro had 
done nothing but work and suffer. There is 
a total lack of measure, too, in the punish- 
ments meted to the black man in this novel. 
One of them asks a white woman to kiss 
him. He makes no effort to force her to 
comply, but he is speedily hanged. "His 
thick lips had been split with a sharp knife, 
and from his teeth hung this placard: 'The 
answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro 

112 



Results of the War in the South 

lips that dare pollute with words the woman- 
hood of the South.' " There is no hint in the 
story that this penalty was slightly excessive, 
nor that a gentleman need hesitate in taking 
part in such an execution. In another place 
a Negro trooper refuses to make room on a 
sidewalk for a lady and her male escort. He 
is at once beaten to death. Surely this is 
the spirit of the tiger. 

Mr. Dixon's ideal Negro is the old planta- 
tion servant who despises his own race. He 
draws the picture of one of them and holds 
him up to admiration. "When the whites 
overthrow the Negro government, old Nelse 
cries, "Dar now ! Ain't I done told you no 
kinky-headed niggers gwine ter run dis 
gov'ment!" I humbly submit that such a 
man is really a disgrace to any race. It is 
on the lines of self-respect that the Negro 
must do his part in solving the race question. 
He must learn his own worth, not in the 
spirit of boastfulness nor of imitation, but in 
the spirit of self-improvement and honor. He 
must put down himself the crimes against 
women which are his shame, and I have faith 
that men like Booker Washington can set 
such a movement on foot. The white clergy 
of the South have a tremendous responsibil- 
ity. They have an influence far transcending 
that of their colleagues in the North. Will 
they use it like Mr. Dixon and the ministers 

113 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

he creates in his book, to foment misunder- 
standings and distrust, or to infuse the spirit 
of Christ into the problem? It is surely dis- 
couraging to find the Episcopal bishop of 
Arkansas, an Ohioan, publicly defending the 
practice of lynching. We all admit now that 
the policy of "reconstruction" was a sad 
mistake and that Northern interference can 
do little, but it is still possible to begin a new 
work of reconstruction based upon human 
sympathy. If the South will undertake this 
task, it will escape the battle of the "beasts" 
which is otherwise inevitable. Swedenborg 
somewhere says that the African race is to be 
the race of love — the race of the future. Let 
it try to live up to this prophecy, and set a 
good example to the whites. The Rev. Henry 
Richards, for many years a missionary on the 
Congo, writes: "I believe the Anglo-Saxon 
to be naturally far more cruel and brutal than 
the African." There should be hope then for 
the latter race. 

It is to be hoped that there is some truth 
in the theory of reincarnation, for it affords 
such grand opportunities for poetic justice. 
If there is anything in it, the author of "The 
Negro a Beast" should make his next ap- 
pearance as a full-blooded Congo black; the 
author of "Leopard's Spots" would figure 
among the mulattos from whom he wishes 
to save us ; and the author of "Up From Sla- 

114 



Results of the War in the South 

very" — well — if any man has earned the right 
to the whitest of skins (if he would like to 
have one) it is Booker Washington. And if 
these three gentlemen came on the stage 
again together, I am confident that we should 
find the last of the three exerting his powers 
for the benefit of the other two in a spirit of 
love to which they are total strangers. 

And I cannot refrain from adding an anec- 
dote or two from my own experience to show 
the perpetual atmosphere of explosives in 
which the Southerner lives as a result of the 
war. We are bad enough in the North, what 
with the enormous number of our homicides, 
the not unusual habit of carrying revolvers, 
and the craze for militarism, battleships and 
warfare; but all these faults are aggravated 
in the South, and it seems a natural result 
of the great war. 

I formed one of a group one evening sit- 
ting around the stove in the hotel office of 
a Southern town. There were three or four 
commercial men, and one old graybeard who 
seemed to be related in some way to the 
proprietor and who was the living image of 
Walt Whitman. From time to time he poked 
the fire with an eld sv/ord, which continual 
use of the kind had reduced to half its origi- 
nal length. 

"You used that all through the wa*, didn't 
you. Uncle Joe?" said one of the party, spit- 

"5 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

ting into the sandbox which held the stove. 
The old man nodded assent, but like a mod- 
est man he showed no desire to enlarge on 
the subject. He gave the sword a shove into 
the sand and drew back into his wooden 
chair. I looked with approval on the con- 
verted weapon. It was even better than a 
spear-made pruning hook, for there had been 
no unnecessary labor of remanufacture and 
no disguise of the happy change of function. 
A young Tennesseean was expatiating upon 
the merits of his house paint. He had for- 
merly been in the tobacco business and had 
sold snuff in regions where the whole popu- 
lation, men, women and children, chew the 
vile stuff until they reek with it. Now he 
was helping to beautify and preserve the 
weather-stained houses of the countryside, 
and I felt that he had been reclaimed as well 
as the sword. We were, barring the spitting, 
a pleasant, cheerful and sociable company. 

Suddenly a draft of air came in upon us 
and we could hear a commotion at the outer 
door, dominated by the agreeable deep- 
chested voice of a man, who was saluting the 
landlord. Soon they came in to the desk, 
two Negroes carrying luggage behind them. 
In a moment the stove was deserted and all 
of my companions gathered around the new 
arrival. He was a large man of middle age 
with a gray mustache and ruddy face, at 

ii6 



Results of the War in the South 

once strong in its lines and good natured. 
My friends approached him respectfully and 
without any sign of their customary familiar- 
ity, and as he shook hands with them there 
was a pleasant word for each. And then in 
his hearty voice he explained that his train 
was ten hours late and that he must get on 
to such and such a town that evening, and 
there was a general giving of advice and tele- 
phoning and consulting of timetables until 
it was proven beyond peradventure that it 
was impossible for him to proceed until the 
morrow. 

Meanwhile I felt rather "out of it," and 
at an early stage of the proceedings good 
old Uncle Joe took pity upon me, and coming 
over to me whispered: 

"You know who that is, don't you?" 

I acknowledged with shame that I did not, 
and with a look of blank amazement, he 
added : 

"Why, that's Major Bedford!" as if the 
announcement would surely startle me. I 
fear that my expression was unsatisfactory 
to him, for there was sorrow in his tone as 
he explained to the benighted Yankee that 
Major Bedford was the biggest lawyer in 
West Carobama, and that only last month 
he got Hank Martin off, though everybody 
knew he had chucked Sam Davis into the 
well. 

117 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

By this time the Major had gone in to sup- 
per and my friends resumed their seats 
around the stove, while a chorus of admira- 
tion for the great lawyer filled the smoky air. 
When it at last subsided, one rather sullen 
individual who was opposite me said drily: 

"He's a mean man, though," and then to 
my surprise, one by one the others nodded 
their heads and echoed: 

*'Yes, he is a mean man." 

I could not account for this apparent 
change of opinion, and I ventured to ask for 
light. 

"I don't quite understand," I said. "You 
were all praising him a minute ago, and he 
certainly seems to be very good natured and 
genial. How can he be a mean man?" 

"You see, he shoots pretty quick. D'you 
remember how he shot Jim Foster in court? 
Why, that young fellow was the most prom- 
ising lawyer in the State, and he had a case 
against the Major, and I don't know how it 
was, but he got excited and said somebody 
lied, and probably they had, and out the 
Major whips his six-shooter and shot the 
boy dead as a doornail." 

"Is it possible," I cried, "and how did he 
escape hanging?" 

"Self-defense," was the laconic reply. This 
was my first lesson in the Southern significa- 
tion of the word "mean," but a few days later 

ii8 



Results of the War in the South 

my education in this respect was completed, 
and I shall never again misunderstand the 
word in that latitude. 

It happened this way. I had taken a room 
for the night in a poor hotel (which is a 
rather uncommon thing in the South). My 
bedroom was not a comfortable place and 
the tobacco stains on the walls were revolt- 
ing. The bed was a bad one, too, and it took 
me a long time to fall asleep, but at last I 
succeeded. I must have been sleeping for 
two or three hours when I heard a loud call 
in the hallway, "Waitah! waitah!" Then 
followed in an undertone a string of drunken, 
incoherent imprecations. "Dam' shame! 
Never come here again. Treat a gen'leman 
so," with a series of unrepeatable oaths get- 
ting louder and louder until he bellowed out 
again, "Waitah, waitah! where's my room, 
waitah!" I could hear the man shuffling 
along the corridor, falling from time to time, 
and trying the doors as he passed, while the 
various inmates of the rooms, with greater or 
less eloquence, called down curses upon his 
head. I expected from moment to moment to 
hear the report of a revolver, and I won- 
dered how much of an obstruction my door 
would offer to a bullet, and was quite pre- 
pared to slide down behind the bed in case 
he should try to get into my room. I watched 
the disturbance auricularly as I have often 

119 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

watched a thunderstorm. At one moment it 
would be raging outside of my door; then it 
would gradually move along, the explosions 
and crashes becoming less distinct until the 
storm center passed quite out of my horizon, 
the unhappy guest having reached a distant 
part of the hotel. Then just as I was dozing 
off, I would hear the faint echoes of his cry, 
"Waitah, waitah !" and it would grow stronger 
and stronger until he would fall in a heap 
again close to my quarters, spluttering, mut- 
tering and cursing worse than before. Three 
or four times the storm cloud disappeared in 
the distance, and three or four times back 
it came, until I was in despair. But once 
again it was slowly blown away, Waitah I 
Waiiah! Waitah!" and I heard it no more. 

It was nearly nine o'clock when I came in 
to breakfast in the morning and took my 
seat at a table occupied by two "drummers," 
who were conversing with each other. 

"Tol'able lively night," remarked one of 
them, whom I shall call Smith. 

"Yes," said I. "Who on earth was that 
man, and what ever became of him?" 

"It's Pete Bunker," replied the man. "Don't 
you know Pete? Why, the Bunkers are one 
of the best families in these parts. The cook 
found him in the kitchen this morning sitting 
at the table fast asleep with his head on his 
arms. He came out of his room for some- 

120 



Results of the War in the South 

thing or other, and couldn't find it again. 
But Pete don't often get drunk like that. 
He's a good fellow when he's sober." 

"He's a mean man, though, sometimes," 
said the other. "Do you remember how he 
shot that nigger Simpson? That was six 
years ago, and the boy can't walk to-day. 
He done for him, he did. And Simpson 
hadn't done nothin', either." 

"Did they try him for it?" I asked. 

"Naw," was the reply, and the two men 
looked at me in wonder. 

"I reckon he left his gun in his room last 
night," said Smith. "It was pretty lucky. 
But there hain't been any shootin' in town 
lately. When was the last shootin', Dave?" 

"A year ago Christmas," answered Dave. 
"That Jake Hart scrimmage. You remember. 
Jake got angry at Cy Jones and shot him 
dead. Jake was an awful nice fellow, but I 
must say he was a mean one. And then 
Tom Spear — he was sheriff — he said he'd 
arrest him if it took him ten years, and Jake, 
he said he shouldn't. I met Jake in the 
street one day, and he says to me, says he, 
'Just you tell Tom Spear that I like him 
first rate,' says he; 'he's done me a lot of 
good turns and I'd like to do him a good 
turn, too; but just you tell him that if he 
tries to grab me I'll shoot him at sight like 
a dog, I will,' says he. 'Just tell him that.' 

121 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

And I told Tom sure enough, and he got 
three fellers to go with him. He wanted me 
to go with him, but I wouldn't — not much. 
I knowed that Jake Hart was a mean man. 
But he went with three of 'em, and they 
heard Jake was at Tim Brown's, and they 
went upstairs and opened the door; and 
Jake, just as quiet as I am, he shoots Tom 
Spear dead; and then the next feller shoots 
Jake right through the chest, and he falls 
down, but he sits up again and draws a bead 
on number two, and down he goes, and then 
he shoots number three, and the fourth man 
he thought he'd better stay dov^^nstairs. That 
was Christmas Eve, and they buried all four 
of 'em together. Ther hain't been any 
shootin' in town since then." 

"Yes, Jake was a mean cuss," said Smith, 
"but I liked him first rate." And we finished 
our buckwheat cakes in silence. 

If Garrison were alive and could visit the 
South to-day and read "Up From Slavery," 
"The Leopard's Spots" and "The Negro a 
Beast," he would find sufficient reasons for 
congratulating himself upon his course. 
Slavery was a crying evil. In a thousand 
ways it was a disgrace to his country and to 
mankind, and it should have been abolished; 
but it was abolished the wrong way. The 
Negro is far better off as a wage earner than 
he was as a slave, but the hostility between 

122 



Results of the War in the South 

the races has been intensified by the rude 
and ruthless manner of bringing the change 
about. And besides this, the habits of four 
years of licensed slaughter, arson, rape and 
rapine have corrupted both races; and not 
the least of the evil legacies of the war is the 
revolver, an instrument manufactured only 
for manslaughter — a miserable, crooked little 
vermin which is gnawing its way into the 
vitals of the community and destroying civ- 
ilization in its path. It ought to be denounced 
in every pulpit and boycotted in every decent 
assembly of men. It is a nuisance which 
must be abated before the South can enter- 
tain any just expectation of rivaling the 
North. She is, hopelessly handicapped by 
her "mean men." 

Garrison believed as fully in the abolition 
of war as in the abolition of slavery. He 
did not believe in doing evil that good may 
come. But he was overruled, and with the 
good came a vast cloud of evils which still 
cast their shadow thick upon the land. 



123 



CHAPTER XII 

PRACTICAL LESSONS FROM GARRI- 
SON'S CAREER 

God is our guide! No swords we draw, 

We kindle not war's battle-fires; 
By union, justice, reason, law, 

We claim the birthright of our sires. 
We raise the watchword, Liberty— 
We will, we will, we will be free! 

—"Songs of Freedom" (Anon.), page 80. 

The abolition of American slavery was a 
single step in the long march of the human 
race toward freedom and a state of peaceful 
social equilibrium undisturbed by the coer- 
cion of man by man, and Garrison was one 
of the few great leaders of such movements 
who appreciated the wider significance of 
his particular task. Mankind has always 
been engaged in this march and perhaps 
always will be. We are taking such steps 
to-day, and the efforts to overthrow imperial- 
ism, militarism, plutocracy, monopoly and all 
other forms of trespass on the rights of 
man are further steps on the road of 
emancipation. We may well then find sug- 
gestions in the Abolition movement which 

124 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

will be of value in forming a diagnosis of 
present conditions and seeking a remedy for 
existing ills. 

(i) And first of all, the Abolition move- 
ment was initiated by people of hum.ble rank 
in society. Garrison began life as a cobbler's 
apprentice, and Lundy was a saddler. Even 
when the war broke out very few persons of 
prominence in society had taken their place 
among the Abolitionists, and those who did, 
such as Wendell Phillips and Edmund Quincy, 
were more or less ostracised and maligned. It 
was never "respectable" to be an Abolitionist. 
And it is true of all great social movements 
that their origin has been outside the pale 
of the "upper classes." Growth does not 
begin at the top, and a healthy, vigorous, just 
cause cannot in the nature of things be 
respectable at first; and just in proportion 
as it becomes respectable it loses its energy 
and single-mindedness. And this estrange- 
ment of the wealth and culture of the day gives 
rise to all sorts of libelous stories regarding 
reformers. Because Garrison and his follow- 
ers were not in "society" they were looked 
upon by "society" with contempt, and it 
became easy to stigmatize them as infidels, 
blasphemers and Sabbath-breakers, and they 
were accused of endeavoring to foment insur- 
rection among the slaves. Nothing was too 
vile or too criminal to be ascribed to them, 

125 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

although they were, in fact, the most reUg- 
ious and puritanic of people. It requires wise 
men, indeed, to look for contemporary his- 
tory, not in the Capitol of Rome or of Wash- 
ington, but in the manger and the attic. 

(2) The churches were unanimously hos- 
tile to Garrison and the Abolitionists. Here 
and there a stray clergyman had the courage 
to support them, but it was at the risk of his 
reputation in his denomination, and most of 
these declared themselves only when the cause 
was far advanced. Garrison and many of his 
friends retorted by cutting loose from all 
ecclesiastical organizations. Their new wine 
was too strong for the old bottles, and it 
always is. The movement for peace to-day 
is obstructed by the churches just as emanci- 
pation was, and almost any church meeting is 
ready to shout for any war, however diabolical, 
in which its country may be engaged, while 
"infidels" and skeptics and materialists out- 
side take up the cause of Christian brother- 
hood. Only last week (as I write) in Phila- 
delphia (the City of Brotherly Love) the 
Pennsylvania Division, United Boys' Brigade 
of America, "in full military uniform," was 
reviewed by the State Commander and 
addressed by the reverend and distinguished 
chaplain. There were companies from the 
Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, 
Reformed, Episcopal, Reformed Episcopal 

126 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

and Moravian churches, and one company 
from Holy Trinity Church was named after 
the "Prince of Peace" ! What would William 
Penn and the early Moravians have said of 
it? And Episcopal missionaries have intro- 
duced the Brigade into China, a nation which 
looks down on war. If lovers of peace leave 
the church as the Abolitionists did, they may 
find more Christianity without, and they will 
not be without good precedents for their action. 
There is something petrifying and deadening 
in institutionalism of all kinds, sacred and 
profane, and a church cannot in the very 
nature of things (except at its very incep- 
tion) be a pioneer in social progress. We 
must be satisfied if it does not fall back too 
far in the rear. Institutions of learning fall 
into the same category, and their general 
influence during the years of anti-slavery 
activity was uniformly reactionary. Those 
who expect to find guidance now or at any 
time for the advance of society in the 
churches or universities are asking impossi- 
bilities and neglecting one of the plainest 
lessons of history — namely, that the priest 
and the professor are rarely in the van. 

(3) Garrison and the Abolitionists found 
themselves arrayed perforce against the laws 
of the land, and these laws, as they were 
carried out by presidents, governors, legisla- 
tors and judges, were among the chief 

127 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

obstacles in the path of justice. Almost all 
the disturbances caused at anti-slavery meet- 
ings — frequently ending in personal violence 
and arson — had the scarcely disguised sym- 
pathy of the authorities, and the law was suc- 
cessfully invoked to spread slavery and return 
the fugitive slave. The leading statesmen 
and politicians of the country, with hardly 
a single exception, did what they could for 
slavery as long as they thought that cause 
advantageous to their fortunes. They had 
substituted paper and ink for their own con- 
sciences, and had forgotten the primitive obli- 
gations of man in the artificial claims of their 
oaths of office. This is surely inhuman. 
How does a bad law or a bad constitution 
differ from any other bad thing? We can- 
not throw the blame for our acts upon parch- 
ment and legal-cap. While a bill is on its pas- 
sage in the legislature we do not hesitate to 
charge improper motives against the mem- 
bers, and we often detect log rolling and 
even bribery and corruption. But when the 
bill has triumphed over our protests and 
become a law we straightway fall down on 
our knees before it. Is not this fetish- 
worship? We talk of the majesty of the law 
as we used to talk of the majesty of our 
rulers; but the two absurdities must vanish 
together, for laws are not a whit more majes- 
tic than those who make and enforce them. 

128 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

There may be majesty in a good law or a 
good man, but there is none whatever in bad 
laws or bad men. It is, I say, nothing but 
fetish-worship — the same spirit which induced 
the Egyptians to sacrifice virgins to the rising 
Nile, and forced Jephthah to slay his daugh- 
ter Jephthah had taken an oath, just as the 
pro-slavery Northern judges and sheriffs had 
taken oaths; but it was an oath better 
honored in the breach than in the observ- 
ance, and there are crimes worse than per- 
jury of this kind. But there was really no 
dilemma for the honest man. He could at 
any moment resign his office. And oaths of 
office are medieval institutions which have 
unfortunately survived a great deal of simi- 
lar rubbish. No bank president or railway 
director has to swear upon the Bible. Why 
should our political people be obliged to? 
The oath has no effect upon a bad man, while 
it can do nothing but worry a good one. We 
have got rid of the comparatively harmless 
folly of the coronation ceremony, and our 
judges and senators do not sit in solemn 
conclave to determine who shall carry the 
king's saltspoon or warming-pan in proces- 
sion, but we have kept the most dangerous 
feature of all, the coronation oath — the oath 
of office. It was this oath taken by George 
III which cost his country dearly. We upset 
the tyranny of George III, but the tyranny 

129 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

of the oath still flourishes. The late Senator 
Tim Campbell, a local politician of some 
fame in the City of New York, once astounded 
the legislature by exclaiming during an acri- 
monious debate, "What is a little thing like 
the Constitution between friends?" There 
was a certain elemental truth in this state- 
ment. Laws and constitutions are made for 
men, and not men for laws and constitutions. 

It is no wonder that Garrison denounced 
the legal obstacles which stood in his way. 
The Abolitionists were ready to revolt, pas- 
sively, against the government, and the con- 
vention in Massachusetts demanded the seces- 
sion of the North. The Constitution of the 
United States was a "covenant with death 
and hell," and there must be no "Union" with 
slave-holders. Thoreau issued a personal dec- 
laration of independence and seceded by him- 
self from the Union. He filed the following 
document with the town clerk: "Know all 
men by these presents that I, Henry Thoreau, 
do not wish to be regarded as a member of 
any incorporated society which I have not 
joined."' 

And Garrison had as little affection for the 
government as Thoreau. He would not even 
use it for his own ends, beyond petitioning it ; 
and I suppose a man might address a petition 

'Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. 
130 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

to any institution without any implied 
approval of it. He showed by the vitality 
of his own influence that the true life of a 
community is independent and outside of 
its governmental forms. God is not in the 
court or the legislature, but in the human 
soul, and courts and legislatures are the last 
places in which to find that vital spark. Take 
our national political system as it is centered 
in Washington, and the one crowning con- 
demnation of it is that it is not the Real 
Thing. It is an empty illusion. Like the 
church of Sardis, it has a name that it lives, 
and is dead. There is a question that lies 
deeper than the one of good and evil, and 
right and wrong. It is the question of vital- 
ity. The Real Thing may be good or bad, 
but it must be alive. God is the Real Thing 
and the devil is the Real Thing, and in 
between all are the shams and make-believes 
and hypocrisies that make up such a large 
part of existence. And the indictment of 
Washington is that it is a sham. There is 
something great in the idea of ruling. Even 
with all the cruelties of Cortez and Genghis 
Khan, governing is a great thing — a crime, 
a sin, an evil, if you will — but still great. 
But Washington does not rule. It has a 
name that it rules, and is a slave. Once it 
was ruled by the oligarchy of Southern land- 
holders and slave-holders. To-day it is ruled 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

by the oligarchy of finance. Dig in Pennsyl- 
vania avenue and you will soon find Wall 
street under the surface. 

Washington is not the Real Thing. Osten- 
sible, nominal governments rarely are. At 
their inauguration they are genuine; but 
nations grow and their forms of government 
do not keep pace with their growth, and the 
power gradually passes into other channels 
and comes from other sources, and yet the 
old forms continue for ages after the life 
has left them and people still bow down to 
the empty shell. The Senate survived in 
Rome long after the Emperor had become 
an autocrat. He deferred to the Senate in 
form, as long as it made no effort to assert 
itself. And so to-day we speak of Senators 
from Colorado or New Jersey or Connecticut, 
and the President of the Senate so addresses 
them from the chair. If he expressed the 
truth he would recognize them as the Sena- 
tors from this, that or the other railway com- 
bination, or from such and such a trust. The 
old power that lay in the people of the States 
has become absorbed by the vast aggrega- 
tions of wealth, and the vitality has passed 
from our politics into our economics. A 
revolution as great as that of Rome has 
taken place, and the public does not yet 
appreciate the fact. 

It is easy to say hard and true things of 

132 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

Wall Street, but that tortuous and narrow 
thoroughfare, with its skyscrapers overawing 
the forgotten church in the graveyard at its 
head, has after all the one supreme virtue — 
it is the Real Thing. No one can question 
its abundant vitality, its vigor, its dominating 
influence. It has drawn to itself the national 
center of gravity. It rules, and Washington 
is only one of its pawns. Wall Street leaves 
the gilded imitation organ pipes to the states- 
men, and plays its own tunes behind them. 
It has the sense to prefer power to show. 
The men who rule in Wall Street do not care 
to have their names appear in the newspa- 
pers. They avoid it, and they leave the field 
of self-advertisement to the politicians who 
swim on the surface and carry out their 
behests. 

Garrison was justified in his distrust of 
politicians and political methods, and in 
addressing himself to the living heart of the 
people and leaving their officeholders and 
their Capital alone. The atmosphere of Wash- 
ington would have been stifling to such a 
frank and outspoken man, and he would have 
been out of his element in Congress. Service 
is higher than office. Someone must needs 
be President, but to live for others is the 
special gift of God. The real life of the nation 
is not to be found at Washington. That fair 
city, with its marble monuments, its memorial 

133 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

statues, recalling so many hatreds and slaugh- 
ters of the past, and its well-kept lawns and 
drives, reminds me of nothing so much as a 
beautiful cemetery — another Woodlawn or 
Greenwood — where all is dead, with no man- 
ufactures, no agriculture, no natural industry 
— peopled by nothing but the mere effigies 
of men and women and hiding a festering 
mass of corruption. Such will never be the 
source of any true reform. 

(4) The message of Garrison was based 
on abstract morality, and never deviated a 
hair's breadth one way or the other on 
account of any discrepancy between the 
exigencies of theory and those of practice. 
We have seen that there is sometimes such 
a discrepancy, but the greatest teachers have 
always risen above it. It was Lundy's attempt 
to postpone the immediate claims of emanci- 
pation which weakened his mission. 

(5) Garrison's message, though springing 
from a spirit of unusual gentleness, which 
condemned all recourse to physical force, was 
couched in the stern and inexorable language 
of absolute truth. The greatest teachers 
have never been mealy-mouthed. The word 
of God is a two-edged sword, and one which 
should not be beaten into ploughshares. It 
was a true instinct which made Garrison 
severe as all the prophets have been severe. 

These five attributes of the cause of Aboli- 

134 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

tion (and there are doubtless many others 
which escape me) are, I believe, the hall- 
marks of all great reforms. We recognize 
them at once in the history of the early 
Christians. They, too, counted among them 
"not many wise men, not many mighty, not 
many noble"; and the truth which they 
preached was hidden from the wise and 
prudent and revealed only unto babes. They, 
too, were charged with stirring up the peo- 
ple and turning the world upside down, with 
uttering blasphemy and breaking the Sab- 
bath. Against them the chief priests and 
rulers, the Caiaphases and Herods and 
Pilates, presented an unbroken front. They 
also asserted principles with which for a 
time at least they justified no compromise, 
and their Founder, while setting them an 
example of suffering without lifting a hand 
in his defense, attacked the respectable sin- 
ners of the day in language which has not yet 
lost its sting. 

We do well to question the value of any 
reform which does not unite these features. 
Any movement which has its source and 
chief support among the great and wealthy 
and learned, which is never accused of rous- 
ing the passions of the oppressed or of run- 
ning counter to the prevailing religion of 
the time, which finds Church or State friendly 
and complaisant, which is ready to yield an 

135 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

iota in matters of principle, which hesitates 
to denounce where denunciation is due, and 
which finally places its reliance in anything 
but the power of truth — any such movement, 
if it be weighed, will be found wanting in the 
elements inherent in a great cause. 

Are we ready to learn these lessons, and 
above all to adopt the methods of peace? 
They that take the sword shall perish by the 
sword. How many a brilliant cause has 
been brought to naught by the folly of its 
adherents, who sought to secure freedom by 
the weapons of tyranny! I have recently 
been reading the life of a reformer who was 
almost a non-resistant — a man of puritanic 
habits and simple life, and devoted with his 
whole soul to the cause of freedom and the 
people — and yet by yielding to the temptation 
of using violent means he made his name the 
object of universal execration. Robespierre 
was until two years or so before his death a 
consistent humanitarian and opponent of 
bloodshed. It is an historical fact that he 
resigned a lucrative judgeship because he was 
unwilling to pronounce a sentence of death. 
When the Revolution was well under way he 
proposed a bill for the abolition of capital 
punishment, and made a good fight for it. 
He refused to be a member of a court to try 
royalists, and served on a committee to pro- 
tect the royal family during the September 

136 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

massacres. Mobs always filled him with 
abhorrence; he opposed the war with the 
allies and took every occasion to protest 
against a standing army on the highest moral 
grounds. He was noted as a friend of the 
Church, even when his friendliness compro- 
mised his power, and the Girondists attacked 
him on account of his belief in God. In 
debate he was particularly fair minded, insist- 
ing on obtaining a hearing for his opponents, 
and never indulging in personalities. It was 
with reluctance that he became a member of 
the terror committee, and he invariably 
avoided signing the guillotine lists when he 
could. Again and again he denounced the 
punishment of men for their opinions, no 
matter what those opinions might be. When 
the Gironde fell, it was Robespierre who 
saved the Right from extermination, and, 
in short, he was, as his last biographer, 
Hilaire Belloc, says, "A man by nature 
opposed to the Terror." Throughout these 
fearful tim.es he maintained unaltered a 
dream of a perfect state in which all should 
be happy and all virtuous. And yet this man 
gradually gave his consent to the Terror in 
order that he might maintain his power and 
realize his vision, until, familiar with its 
frightful mien, he seized upon it as a means 
to his end, and was finally destroyed by the 
extremists whom he intended to kill. It is an 

137 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

undoubted fact that his plan was, after a few 
more days of slaughter, to abolish the revo- 
lutionary court and inaugurate his Rous- 
seauan commonwealth; but it is idle to spec- 
ulate as to what might have happened if he 
had not fallen so soon. To the end he 
remained true to some of his ideals. He 
would not consent to an insurrection in his 
own behalf until it was too late, nor when 
arrested would he accept release without the 
order of the Convention, for the Convention 
represented his adored People. But for this 
delay his life would have been saved. 

How can such a career as Robespierre's be 
explained? With Garrison's faith in the un- 
aided power of the right, he would have had a 
sure clue to follow. Without that faith no 
man is to be trusted in such an environment. 
It is difficult for us to imagine the effect of 
bloodthirsty surroundings; and yet have we 
not seen in South Africa and China and the 
Philippines equally striking examples of it? 
Robespierre became finally a conspicuous 
incarnation of all that he most hated, and he 
reached this point by adopting means which 
he knew were wrong, to gain an end in which 
he profoundly believed. He dreaded most of 
all to be left out of the stream of events — 
dropped on one side on account of his 
scruples, and consequently he plunged in, 
was sucked into the maelstrom, and died, 

138 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

having justly earned that reputation which of 
all others he v/ould most have deprecated. 
If he had fallen before the trial of the King, 
or if he had remained true to his conscience 
and returned home when he found that he 
could no longer guide his country along the 
paths of peace, his name would have gone 
down in history with Garrison's as that of a 
benefactor of mankind. 

When the time comes to make another dis- 
tinct advance in that great movement towards 
justice of which the French Revolution and 
the anti-slavery agitation v^^ere episodes, shall 
we follow the lead of Robespierre or that of 
Garrison? It is quite possible that a revolu- 
tion in America to-day would end as did 
that of 1789 in France. It will not do 
to pooh-pooh the idea as monstrous. Men 
who can shoot down prisoners and administer 
the water torture in the Orient might have 
no insuperable objection to the guillotine at 
home. In the case of some great industrial 
crisis within the next few years, when prac- 
tically all workmen are idle, let us suppose 
that they begin tO' riot in many places at 
once, and call for the bread which they can- 
not earn. The ordinary machinery of com- 
merce and of government has broken down. 
In the midst of the disorder a national con- 
vention is called and delegates flock to Wash- 
ington, with the mutterings and threats of 

139 



Garrison the Non-Resistant 

discontent and starvation in their ears. They 
would no longer be the futile politicians of 
ordinary elections — the absurd and ridiculous 
mannikins who now strut through the forms 
of legislation; but real representatives of the 
people, newly stirred to a consciousness of 
their needs. I fancy I could name a score of 
the delegates — men and women of the high- 
est ideals and capacity. Such a representa- 
tive body would be certain to compare favor- 
ably from the point of view of ability with 
the French Assembly, and it would come to- 
gether with the same lofty aims and the same 
devotion to them. Would it end in the same 
carnival of horror? With the example of 
the peace-loving Robespierre before us it is 
impossible to scout the idea. The only safe- 
guard against such a danger is the utter 
repudiation of all violent methods of reform. 
Once permit yourself to rely upon rifles and 
prisons, and the descent is easy to all kinds 
of cruelty and torture. The lesson of all his- 
tory is that men are not to be trusted with 
the power of life and death over their fel- 
lows; and any revolution which claims for 
itself any such power carries in its bosom 
the seeds of a counter movement which will 
bring in again the supremacy of the party of 
reaction. The best mental exercise for 
reformers is to accustom themselves to the 
idea of dispensing with the use of physical 

140 



Lessons from Garrison's Career 

force, and of commending their cause to the 
higher powers of influence, persuasion and 
truth. 

And Garrison was the true prophet of such 
a peaceful method. He had the genuine spirit 
of reform which we might do well to accept 
from him as an inheritance. He was, indeed, 
to use his friend Quincy's words, uttered as 
early as 1838, "one of those rare spirits 
which heaven at distant periods sends upon 
the earth on holiest missions." He was, as 
all such men are, in advance of his time, — "too 
great . . to be a representative man at 
present," as Harriet Martineau declared, but, 
she added, "his example may raise up a class 
hereafter." Such an example is indeed full 
of inspiration for those who see in the world 
around them many evils not altogether un- 
related to those against which Garrison 
struggled so long and so faithfully. But 
wherever the cause of justice may call us, let 
us be careful to go in his spirit, for, as one of 
his fellow-workers truly said, "Non-resistance 
is the temper of mind in which all enterprises 
for humanity should be undertaken." 




141 



The Books of Ernest Crosby 

Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable 

A collection of chants in the cause of justice and brotherhood. 

i2mo, cloth, i88 pages, $1.50; by mail, $1.63. Paper, 40 cents, 
by mail, 44 cents. 
Captain Jinks, Hero 

A keen satire on our recent wars in which the parallel between 
savagery and soldiery is unerringly drawn. Profusely illustrated 
by Dan Beard. 

i2mo, cloth, 400 pages. $1.50, postpaid. 

Swords and Plowshares 

A collection of poems filled with the hatred of war and the 
love of nature. 

i2mo, cloth, 126 pages, fi.20; by mail, $1.29. Not sold by us 
in Great Britain. 
Tolstoy and His flessage 

A concise and sympathetic account of the life, character and 
philosophy of Tolstoy. 

i6mo, cloth, 93 pages, 50 cents; by mail, 54 cents. Not sold 
by us in Great Britain. 
Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster 

An essay on education and punishment, with Tolstoy's curious 
experiments in teaching as a text. 

i6mo, cloth, 94 pages, 50 cents; by mail, 53 cents. 

Garrison the Non-Resi«tant 

An account of the career of William Lloyd Garrison, with a 
lively discussion of the propriety of overcoming slavery by war 
and of the promotion of reform by peaceful methods, and a con- 
sideration, from an entirely original point of view, of the results 
of the Civil War in the South and in the North. 

i6mo, cloth, 144 pages, with photogravure portrait, 50 cents ; 
by mail, 54 cents. 
Broad-Cast 

New chants and songs of labor, life and freedom. This latest 
volume of poems by the author of "Plain Talk in Psalm and 
Parable" and "Swords and Ploughshares," conveys the same 
message delivered with equal power. 

i2mo, cloth, 128 pages, 50 cents; by mail, 54 cents. 

Edward Carpenter, Poet and Prophet 

An illuminative essay, with selections and portrait of 
Carpenter. 

i2mo, paper, 64 pages, with portrait of Carpenter on cover, 20 
cents, postpaid. 
Oolden-Rule Jones, Hayor of Toledo 

An appreciative character sketch of Samuel M. Jones, from 
an intimate viewpoint. 

In press, i6mo, paper, 60 pages, 25 cents, postpaid. 



The Public Publishing Company 

First National Banic Building, CHICAGO 



TDE WORKS OF LEO TOLSTOY 



A new edition, containing all of his writings, in 12 volumes, 8vo, 
sold only in sets. 

Popular edition, cloth binding, plain edges; per set, $12.00; 
carriage prepaid. 

Library edition, on fine paper, elegantly bound in cloth, gilt top, 
back and center; per set, 815.00; in half calf, gilt top, per set, 830.00; 
carriage prepaid. 



SINGLE VOLUMES 

WAR AND PEACE, 2vols., $3.00. 

ANNA KARENINA, 3 vols., illustrated, 83.00; same, 1 vol., 81.50. 

CHILDHOOD, BOYHOOD and YOUTH, with WHAT TO DO, 
I vol., 81.50. 

THE COSSACKS, with SEVASTOPOL, i vol., $1.50. 

IVAN ILYITCH, with FAMILY HAPPINESS, i vol., 81.50. 

MY CONFESSION, with MY RELIGION, and THE GOSPEL IN 
BRIEF, I vol., 81.50. 

THE GOSPEL IN BRIEF, i vol., 81.25. 

WHAT IS ART, 1 vol., 81.00. 

WHAT IS RELIGION, i vol., 60 cents (postage 6 cents). 

ESSAYS AND LETTERS, 1 vol., $2.00. 

GOSPEL STORIES, i vol., 81.25. 

BETHINK YOURSELVES, a letter on the war between Russia and 
Japan; paper, 64 pages, 10 cents, postpaid. 

A GREAT INIQUITY, an article on property in land ; paper, 48 pages, 
4 cents a copy, postpaid ; 82.50 per 100. A better edition, paper, 
44 pages, illustrated, 10 cents a copy, 12 copies for 81.00, postpaid. 

The Public Publishing Company 

FIRST NATIONAL BANK BUILDING 

CHICAGO 



!:)EC W05 



